[Development] Minified javascript libraries in Qt source code

[Thiago Macieira]

On sexta-feira, 27 de setembro de 2013 22:54:58, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez 
Meyer wrote:
> This is a nice example, thanks Thiago for it. I think the problem here is
> to  correctly define "best".
> 
> We can say that "best" is do the minimum required to comply with the
> license.  If so, maybe shipping just the PNGs is just fine.

Right. Let's figure out what the letter & spirit of the license require. Then 
we can talk about convenience.

> But we can also say that "best" is letting whoever downloads a tarball from 
> us, and that tarball + a compiler is enough to build the whole project, be
> able to change whatever she wants without the need to get another tarball.

Now that's convenience. For a couple of files, I don't think it's wrong to ship 
the extra sources and instructions or scripts to recreate if possible. It's 
just a couple bytes more.

With no buildsystem modification, though. No minification or rasterisation at 
build time. We don't do that even for the lexer used in qxmlstream (the 
qxmlstream.g file is shipped and there's a script to recreate, though).

> Now my personal definition of "best" is the second one. So yes, I would 
> include the SVG/PSD files and generate the PNGs from there on build time
> (much  as KDE does with icons, although there are other reasons there). I
> understand that not everyone will agree with me, but I also know that there
> are lots of people who does. That's why distros like Debian or Ubuntu
> enforce this.

I doubt that they enforce convenience. However, they do enforce "everything 
that we ship can be modified and here are the sources in the preferred format".

But just as the distros ship binaries and allow you to download the source 
tarballs, we can do the same if necessary: we can ship the processed files and 
make the original sources available on our website.

So, in the interest of respecting the licenses and keeping downstream happy, I 
vote for the Qt Project always supplying the preferred sources for modification 
for whatever we ship. Whether the same sources are present in our regular 
tarballs or not, it should be judged on a case-by-case basis.

(e.g., we don't want to add 50 MB monster PSD files to a 2 MB tarball)
-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
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