[Interest] QtArg

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 10/04/12 23:23, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> 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)
>
> Static linking Qt usually already brings it upwards of 20 MB. The KDE
> libraries aren't much bigger, especially not kdecore. In fact, kdecore + kdeui
> are the size of QtGui.

The application compiles into a single 10MB *.exe here.  1MB of this is 
my own code, and about 2MB is from other libraries.  Qt takes about 7MB 
total, which is quite OK.


> In any case, KDE has explicitly shunned static building. It's not possible to
> build the KDE libs in static mode. It was a design decision many years ago
> that has simplified life.
>
> I wish we could do the same for Qt. Keeping it linking statically is very hard
> and we break every other release because no one tests.
>
> BTW, it's known to be broken in Qt 5.

So goodbye to self-contained executables?  That doesn't sound like a 
good idea :-/  Being able to ship a single *.exe is quite a nice thing 
to have.


>>> 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.
>
> Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution. The other, major GNOME distribution
> is Fedora. Unlike Ubuntu, it has made no such decision to include Qt.

Ubuntu is the most popular one though.


> Besides, it also depends on how the distribution splits up the packages -- or
> fails to do so. Like Stephen said, for KDE Frameworks 5, we want to modularise
> better, like Qt 5.

That is certainly good news.

Since we derailed this thread anyway, I have a question: any plans of 
making it possible to support mobile platforms and desktops from the 
same source?  Right now, we're forced to use QWidget on desktop and QML 
on mobiles.  Will QML be ported correctly to desktops or QWidget 
correctly ported to mobiles?

One of the promises of Qt has been WORA (write once, run anywhere).  QML 
broke that promise (not in theory, but in practice, which is what's 
important.)