[Development] Removing Wacom support in Qt5

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Thursday 06 September 2012 Sep, Ariel Molina wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> There is a really old, and quite long, list of bugs at Qt, take for example:
> https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-9190
> 
> Wacom support is broken, it's in fact somewhere between alpha or beta
> state, some tablets work some others dont. In OSX they work pretty
> good, in windows you really suffer. The driver works fine for several
> non-Qt apps (Adobe Suite works just fine)
> 
> 0) It's not a driver issue
> 1) Wacom support is broken in Qt, several bugs are closely related
> 2) QtCreator, qmlpuppet and every single Qt App is affected by bugs right now
> 3) There is no official Wacom support
> 4) Few % of Qt apps are in fact targeting Wacom
> 5) Nobody cares about Wacom anyway, or the bug should be solved by now
> (some bugs are 2+ years old)
> 6) Digia wrote a patch, but it's a hack and was rejected
> 7) There are examples showcasing Qt's Wacom support but this is not
> true, Wacom is broken, nobody complains because 5)

Huh? I don't follow you here. I'm sure Krita isn't the only Qt application that needs tablet support. This list looks to me like a mish-mash of things that aren't a reason from dropping wacom support at all and things that aren't true or relevant.

> 
> Another point to consider:
> 
> 1) Quick 2.0 is the way to go, but it targets designers
> 2) Designers use mostly Adobe suite and other similar tools
>      (this means probably Wacoms in there)
> 3) Even with the Wacom unplugged the bugs are present, killing the
> usefulness of even QtCreator
> 4) Many scenarios will pop where designers+coders work in the same workstations
> 5) These wacom problems will become common as time passes
> 
> Myself have a room with 40+ workstations where the driver is
> installed/uninstalled at least once a week, it's a nightmare.

Huh? Qt Creator works fine here... And I've got a wacom plugged in all the time. You seem to be saying that people designing an application with Qt Creator have trouble because they have a wacom attached, and that that's a reason Qt should drop its tablet support? That sounds weird to me.

> Is it better to remove Wacom for Qt5? what do you think?

I think that would be utterly disastrous. I haven't tried porting Krita to Qt5 yet, but for me on Windows and Linux, Qt's wacom support is good enough to write big, complex applications like Krita. Sure, there are bugs, though most problems I encounter come from Ubuntu patching stuff for multitouch support. But I am sure I would have more bugs if I tried to do tablet handling on my own, like in the Qt 3.x days.

And what are you going to do with api's like QTabletEvent? Remove those as well? I thought that moving to Qt5 was supposed to be smooth and easy. You cannot chop off api like that...

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl