[Interest] Qt 5 requirements: xcb or wayland required

[Thiago Macieira]

On quarta-feira, 11 de abril de 2012 14.56.13, Carl Schumann wrote:
> Qt 5 community,
> 
> I notice some documentation that states that the current Qt 5 Alpha
> requires xcb or wayland.   Is this requirement expected to be relaxed in
> future releases?

Technically speaking, Qt 5 requires neither.

But if you don't build at least one QPA platform plugin, you won't see 
anything on the screen. So you should choose one to build, from among the 
existing ones.

> I am not an expert, so I don't really even understand what xcb or
> wayland's role would be in Qt 5.   But I am at a shop that uses X11 and
> I understand that xcb and wayland maybe newer alternatives to X11.
> Unfortunately, retiring X11 would probably be a big issue around here.

I'm not sure you understand what XCB is. It's a different library that also 
binds to the X11 protocol. Any non-dinosaurian Linux distribution has it, as 
X.org's libX11 has depended on libxcb for many years now.

Qt 5's XCB plugin will require a somewhat newer XCB (i.e., more recent than 
the dinosaur age). I don't foresee a problem for that, as we've discussed that 
Qt 5 is new, so we don't feel obliged to support very old distributions.

This might be a problem for non-Linux Unixes. I don't know how easy it is to 
build libxcb, but my first guess would be that it isn't: it's just binding to 
the protocol, which has been a standard for decades.

Still, there is an experimental xlib plugin in the Qt 5 source tree. 
Unfortunately, it is very much behind the xcb one in terms of functionality, 
and it's not guaranteed to compile.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
     Intel Sweden AB - Registration Number: 556189-6027
     Knarrarnäsgatan 15, 164 40 Kista, Stockholm, Sweden
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