[Interest] QtArg

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 10/04/12 22:38, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On terça-feira, 10 de abril de 2012 22.30.54, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>> On 10/04/12 22:24, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>>> On terça-feira, 10 de abril de 2012 22.07.49, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>>>>> Which is a pity. There's a lot of functionality in the KDE libs that you
>>>>> should use. You should consider transforming your Qt-only app into a KDE
>>>>> one.
>>>>
>>>> That is really bad advise :-/  It would mean non-KDE users (about 90% of
>>>> my userbase) will not use the app.  But I still care very much about the
>>>> remaining 10%!  But if push came to shove, I'd rather drop KDE (10%)
>>>> than the rest (90% - Gnome, Windows, OS X.)
>>>
>>> That was an ironic way of saying that there's a lot of good things inside
>>> the KDE libraries, so (the next paragraph's message) you should be glad
>>> that some of it is finding its way to Qt 5.
>>>
>>> That said, I don't follow your reasoning. KDE applications run outside of
>>> KDE just fine, so linking to the KDE libs does, by itself, exclude those
>>> other environments.
>>
>> In theory it doesn't exclude them, in practice it does.  Gnome users
>> avoid KDE apps like the plague, and telling users to install KDE on
>> Windows would sound just idiotic to them.
>
> If you have to tell your Windows users that, you have the blame: you didn't do
> a good job of packaging your application into a nice installer.

Bundling KDE libs?  It's much simpler to not use KDE functionality. 
Otherwise you end up with a big size that is unsuitable for small 
utility applications.

And I don't need an installer.  People value single executables that can 
be copied and run from everywhere (internal hard disks, USB flash 
sticks, whatever.)  And I'm not sure I could link KDE statically into a 
single *.exe like I do with Qt (and if it's possible, it would probably 
end up as some 50MB monstrosity or something :-P)

Also OS X is an issue, and then there's Android (using Necessitas).  I 
understand that KDE considers itself a high-quality project, but 
seriously, it should be avoided for applications that don't explicitly 
want to be considered KDE apps and want to also run on non-Linux systems.


> As for the GNOME users, they avoid Qt-based applications too.

Ubuntu ships Qt by default now, so that problem was taken care of.  And 
besides, installing Qt is acceptable to many users (it's quite small.) 
Installing KDE with all its deps is absolutely not OK for many of them.