[Interest] Oops! Somebody's got a bad case of dependency bloat!

[Bob Hood]

On 4/10/2013 2:52 PM, Justin Ferguson wrote:
> Support will always suck for that platform.

Please don't make disturbing statements like that.  Ifthat were actually true,
then it hugely discounts Qt as an option in development pipelines, whether or
not it provided commercial support.  I would not go to my team and champion Qt
on the project, knowing that "support will always suck for" Windows.  We use
Windows/Visual Studio as our primary development platform, and then
build/tweak on OS X (and probably Linux, before long).  AFAIK, only one person
on my team uses OS X as his primary development platform.

My problem is that the introduction of Perl to the build process breaks the
out-of-the-box nature of Qt.  All I required before was the compiler/IDE
environment that I would have already been installed anyway for me to be able
to use Qt in the first place.  Now, Perl is on my system just for one aspect
of building Qt, and it is of no further use.  Awkward design.

Look, I understand it's OSS, and I also understand that Thiago (like many
others) is a volunteer, and it was not my intent to attack him or his
contributions in any way.  I'm simply concerned by a growing tendency I am
seeing in the industry as a whole as OSS becomes employed to a greater and
greater degree commercially.  I've seen some OSS projects have an
"it's-good-enough" attitude, which is fine when it stays within the OSS
ecosystem, but when it gets into commercial endeavors, it can be very
frustrating to depend on, or, in some cases, even fatal.

I always had the impression that Qt's developers held themselves to somewhat
higher standards for an OSS project.