[Development] A new approach for Qt main()

[Matthew Woehlke]

On 2016-12-09 04:35, Morten Sorvig wrote:
> We should consider changing the way Qt initialization and startup works.
> This is something I’ve personally been wanting to do for some time, and
> a recent offline discussion pushed it on my stack again.
> 
> Currently, Qt and application startup looks something like this:
> 
>   int main(int argc, char **argv)
>   {
>       QApplication app(argc, argv);
> 
>       // Create root user objects/windows here
> 
>       return app.exec();
>   }
> 
> We can continue with the workarounds, but they lead to complications in Qt
> platform code and are also an extra hurdle for implementing support for new
> platforms, so from the Qt platform development point of view it is desirable
> with a cleanup. 
> 
> This would be an “all applications should/must port” event, not to be taken 
> lightly. I think the porting would be trivial in many (if not most) cases,
> but some apps have special requirements for QApplication object management
> or main thread ownership. This includes our own QTestLib.

One concern I have is if users are monkeying with argc/argv prior to
constructing a QApplication instance. IIRC, KDE used to do this (not
sure if they still do), and qtCliArgs¹ does this also. This allows, for
instance, enforcing a consistent argument naming policy that differs
from Qt's own policy, while still being able to pass Qt CLI arguments.

Also, how does this work if someone wants to subclass Q*Application?
(Again, I have projects that do that...)

(¹ https://github.com/Kitware/qtextensions/blob/master/core/qtCliArgs.h)

-- 
Matthew