[Development] Qt LTS & C++11 plans (CopperSpice)

[Simon Hausmann]

On Monday, June 29, 2015 10:51:25 PM Ansel Sermersheim wrote:
> > There is always CopperSpice the Qt fork which uses C++11.  They've
> > got rid of moc and plan to replace Qt containers with std ones.
> > Afterwards maybe they will add support for namespaces to their
> > peppermill source convertor utility.
> 
> I am one of the developers of CopperSpice and I would like to
> elaborate on our project. Our initial release of CopperSpice was in
> July 2014 with our target audience being our local C++ Users Group in
> the San Francisco Bay area.  We wanted to explore the interest in
> CopperSpice and obtain feedback regarding the steps we took to remove
> moc. Our full presentation in February 2015 was well received and
> attended by several prominent people.

I for one welcome your efforts. I think it's great that you're trying out new 
things on the shoulders of Qt. To me this feels healthy and I'm at this point 
not worried about fragmentation. Experimentation is something we should 
encourage, even if those experiments happen in deep core parts of the 
framework. I'm also glad to see that you're sharing your work with the rest of 
the development community on github.

It would be great if some of your improvements, some of your innovations could 
- in the future - find their way back to Qt. It's not evident at this point 
how exactly, but I think it would be good to keep it in the back of our heads.


That said, I did see the slides of your presentation in February 2015 and I am 
disappointed about the slide with the heading "Why we developed CopperSpice". 
It says that one of the reasons was that "Libraries not developed as a true 
open source project". This is disappointing for me to read. Thiago, Lars and 
others who have worked on the governance rules of Qt have done tremendous work 
to establish the true open source umbrella, especially by learning from other 
projects and taking the experience into account when formulating the 
contribution and governance guidelines.

I hope that in future presentations of your project you are not going to give 
your audience the impression that Qt is not a true open source project.


Simon