[Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 114, Issue 38

[Konrad Rosenbaum]

Hi,

On 01/04/2021 00:00, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Actually, I think the other reason why RHEL 6 was dropped (aside from too old
> a compiler, but you have devtoolset to solve that) was the lack of updated XCB
> libraries. Which we needed to update in order to get things like modern 
input
> devices (via evdev) and... HiDPI. The other part of the pain is that we
> stopped bundling XCB libraries with Qt sources, thus forcing you to build them
> from sources and deal with their build systems.

I vaguely recall that I did exactly this at the time, the reason was 
that a customer wanted to provide an application with a newer main 
target platform to a group of engineers that were stuck on CentOS6 or 
RHEL6, so we needed to back-port it there. The application needed a 
newer compiler (some C++11) and had already used APIs from a newer Qt 
than available there. So we ended up compiling a new GCC, XCB and a 
bunch of other support libraries, Qt and finally the application itself. 
Some XCB related functionality didn't work right, but that was 
acceptable for that project. We declared success.

As I recall we used a lot of coffee and did our fair share of cursing, 
but nobody got hurt.

I have to agree with Thiago on this point: if you want something new you 
have to acknowledge the possibility that it will not work on something 
significantly older or requires lots of labor to make it work. Most 
modern software will not run on a 16th century abacus.

But I'm getting the feeling that there is a market niche for abacus 
support contracts in the Qt ecosystem that is waiting for someone to 
fill it... ;-)


     Konrad


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