[Development] New library in qtbase

[Robin Burchell]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2017, at 11:58 PM, Samuel Gaist wrote:
> Short summary, we have three possibilities:
> 1) Own module (and current implementation)
> 2) One “core" module and one GUI module to separate concerns for system
> not requiring a GUI connection (Jake’s suggestion)
> 3) Put everything in QtGui and implement the stuff in the QPA parts with
> the implication that a QGuiApplication will be required.
> 
> Can we come to an agreement about which one to implement ?

My own vote would be tending towards 3 once the concept is nailed down.
The existing change looks a little confused from a quick skim, e.g. you
have a QCocoaNotifier which seems to be public API, but this is not the
way I would expect to see this (at least, not in QtGui); I'd expect to
see a "notification" class without any platform specifics, as far as
possible, which then hooked into platform-specific code to "do its
magic".

As the "magic" would tend to be platform-specific, QPA seems to be the
logical place to me; this then also allows a platform implementer to
provide their own custom notification handling, should it be required –
thinking more on the embedded or new platform front here, which is
typically where QPA comes in anyway, where you may not necessarily have
existing services or standards to follow.

I can agree that it's "sad" to have to switch a QCoreApplication to a
QGuiApplication once you need something in it, even if you don't have a
GUI to present (though really, is this a common problem?), but aside
from puritanical concerns, does that actually cause many concrete
issues?

So, considering that, and as it's a problem that already exists for
non-graphical applications to have to interact with images/clipboard,
for syntax highlighting and other text manipulation, etc, I don't think
that adding another case to that problem is a death sentence. I think
it's an extension of a minor inconvenience, but I don't think that
arbitrary splitting of a feature or class is a good way to address that.
It leads to a harder to use & understand API for little gain as I
imagine it, though it is hard to say without a concrete suggestion on
API to review.

In the much longer term, on a separate tangent from your work, it might
be interesting to think about rearranging things to properly address
this problem if the gain is worth it, but even then, that starts to get
tricky & requires a lot of care and research, especially when you
realize that not everything you may want can be done without a windowing
system: clipboard access, for instance, I'd say is almost certainly
impossible to do without a windowing system on all platforms

The same may apply to presenting notifications. Do you know the specific
requirements of the APIs for, say, Windows/macOS/iOS/Android? If any of
those (or future platforms) required the WS, then you'd essentially be
left with a useless API on anything that did not have a QGuiApplication.

I'd say that ultimately, requiring a QGuiApplication instance is a
lesser evil than providing an API that won't work universally.

-- 
  Robin Burchell
  robin at crimson.no