[Development] QtQuickControls for desktop: what's the plan?

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Hello all,
let's take a step back and get back into a productive discussion :)

I'm sorry that Jake uses so harsh words and I hope everyone understands he 
expresses his personal opinion since he's not even directly involved in the Qt 
Quick Controls (1/2) project.

Yesterday we had some debate here in Oslo about what is needed for controls in 
the near future and where we see things heading. I should have joined the 
discussion earlier, but I perfer to ponder things a bit before shouting out 
loud.

>From our point of view, one of the biggest show stoppers in the near future is 
the lack of table view support (which touches listview and related). This is a 
topic that keeps comming up and we want to get it right, since in qcc1 you 
could hardly have more than 10 columns without massive performance issues.
So the current focus for us is polishing what we have and looking at the lists 
and tables.

At the same time there seem to be three big gaps in styling.
We have researched an iOS style, there are some legal concerns around it since 
it's unclear what Apple allows in the app store, so that's somewhat on hold, 
maybe we'll just publish it without any guarantees (that it's viable to get 
apps on the store with it) since we cannot give any. In the mean time, using 
custom styles should be perfectly fine for the iOS case. Slightly ironic.

With that said, macOS is another candidate where we're starting to look. 
Again, Apple is not making it exactly easy by basically not providing public 
APIs, but we'll see what we end up with. Especially animations will be 
interesting. Any insights and help is of course appreciated.

The last gap are Linux styles. The situation with KDE is actually quite 
interesting, since the platform is QStyle based. We do not believe in QStyle 
based styles for QQC2 as it stands. They will never have the same performance 
level of the other styles. Changing QStyle is not exactly trivial either, but 
maybe we can find a way to make it efficent and share code. Maybe we in the end 
conclude that it's all too much work and we want to have a QStyle based theme 
in controls 2, but let's first explore the options. I don't know the code 
enough to have any kind of opinion at this point and I'd propose people that 
actually have better insights explore which way makes most sense.

Now we're back to where we started the discussion and I hope we'll find out how 
to cooperate best, inside or outside the controls repository.

Kind regards,
Frederik