[Qt-interest] Qt 4.8 and XCode 4.2

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday, 2 de November de 2011 11:11:06 Richard S.  Wright Jr. wrote:
> It's not really the same as wanting, say a toolbar to be a little thinner,
> or perhaps a new class that would be useful. This is pretty basic
> development environment support, for what is a mainstream toolset. To
> deprecate XCode on the Mac… it's hard not to take that as an affront. It's
> hard not to imagine that future direction will make this more and more
> difficult as time goes on. It's hard to imagine that the new "elders" care
> as much about cross platform development as Trolltech did.

I still care as much as I did in 2006 when I started working for Trolltech. 
Lots of people still working at Nokia were there when I started, and I'm 
pretty sure we indoctrinated the ones who came since to value cross-platform 
support.

First of all, let's be clear: it's qmake's generation of XCode projects that 
is deprecated. Not XCode itself, though yes it's harder to use it.

I don't remember the exact details why XCode project support was deprecated, 
as I'm not a Mac developer and I've never owned a Mac. But I can tell you that 
priorities change and code rots. It's very hard to maintain qmake's source 
code, so maintaining that support and, more importantly, updating it to the 
new XCode versions was simply left behind in the priority list.

You make the same mistake that most people do: you assume that what's 
important to you is important to everyone ("pretty basic development 
environment support"). I'm sorry, that's just not how it works and it didn't 
work back then like that either. Some features and requests will take higher 
priority because of need, other lower-priority ones will get done because 
they're easier or because skill is available to implement.

So in the end, what happened was that the people who used to maintain the 
support are either no longer working on Qt, are working on higher-priority 
tasks or have decided they don't want to work on qmake anymore. Moreover, with 
Qt Creator available for Mac, support for XCode has decreased in priority.

It's hard to dwell on "what-ifs" in human situations, but I'd guess that XCode 
support would *still* have been deprecated even if Trolltech were an 
independent company. Qt Creator had already started development back when the 
acquisition happened.

So we'd be here, discussing XCode project support being deprecated. The 
difference is that you wouldn't be blaming open source because it would be 
clear that the lack of support had nothing to do with open-sourceness. And 
you'd have 3 options fewer to make your needs be met.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
      PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
      E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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