[Interest] STILL LOOKING for a QPA

[Knight Andrew]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tomasz Siekierda [mailto:sierdzio at gmail.com]
> Sent: 20 May 2014 16:23
> To: Knight Andrew
> Cc: Jason H; interest at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Interest] STILL LOOKING for a QPA
> 
> On 20 May 2014 14:17, Knight Andrew <Andrew.Knight at digia.com> wrote:
> >> Where are the docs?
> >
> > QPA is an internal API, so don't expect any formal documentation or
> compatibility promises.
> 
> I don't think this is a good idea to hide the documentation for QPA...
> Qt is advertised as cross-platform, and since Qt 5 the motto is "oh
> yeah, and it's actually simple to port to new platforms now". I
> remember the talk around 5.0 and 5.1 was "we're working on the
> documentation, it is not ready yet". Now you seem to be saying "that's
> not our problem". This is not good. The easier Qt is to port, the more
> users and ports will it have.

That's certainly not what I'm saying, and the documentation is far from hidden (it's right in the source!). That's a whole lot better than most internal implementation details. You seem to be forgetting that Qt has very strict API and ABI guarantees, and that QPA was built to offer a way to change platform abstraction without breaking the public API/ABI. QPA is not designed to be a public Qt interface, even if it is relatively stable. Even if we have a lot to say about it (in blogs, etc.), that doesn't mean it solves application-level programming problems (like most Qt classes do/should). It doesn't.

So, no, this has nothing to do with non-inclusiveness or an unwillingness to embrace new platforms or keeping things under wraps until they are "finished". It will never be finished. The flexible nature of QPA's private API gives us the ability to change it as platforms evolve (or new platforms come in with new requirements) without the overhead of making development decisions that we can't take back until Qt's next major release.

Cheers,
Andrew

> 
> Good day to you all,
> sirdzio