Boudewijn: what does Krita need Qt4 for right now? is there nothing that couldn't be improved right now that doesn't need Qt4? imho, krita would survive just fine on linux/unix for another release or two and i don't see how image embedding or text printing affects krita.
the problem here seems to be the monolithic nature of koffice. sharing code between all those apps makes tons of sense; having an integrated office sweet makes just as much sense; but not allowing individual releases of apps where it makes sense seems pretty dense to me.
krita can't devel against koffice 1.x libs for another release or two while koffice2 libs come into being? i dunno, perhaps not. maybe krita is a good example of what ought to move to kde4/qt4 ASAFP.
i don't think it holds for for vast majority of apps, however.
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With my distro hat on, I would love to see single Krita releases. Most distros include OpenOffice and there is not much use for all of Koffice afterwards but there is always a place for apps like Krita and Kivio.
For example, look at gimp's crop tool. Qt4 supports alpha blending, so this could be easily done. With Qt3 it is quite hard to do.
Aaron, did I talk about Krita? No, I did not. I was talking about KOffice (of which Krita is a part). These days I'm not just developing Krita, I'm the KOffice release dude. KOffice needs Qt4's text engine, and has been in need for it for at least a year.
Boudewijn
hear anonymous. i think that's the point: Qt4 and KDE4 are supposed to be much more efficient. of course, they COULD do everything in Qt 1.0 with KDE 1.0, but it would take less time and effort to do it with KDE 4 and Qt4. I think KDE 4 shouldn't take too long - as soon as it is basically stable and ready, push out a KDELIBS and KDEBASE release, and let all other apps come on their own schedule. that way, we'd have a KDE4 (base) before the end of this year.
> For example, look at gimp's crop tool.
> Qt4 supports alpha blending, so this could be easily done.
> With Qt3 it is quite hard to do.
Come on, this can be done with any toolkit, there are even Xaw applications showing alpha blending.
Do you know Digikam? They have a nice crop tool, too. And it darkens to-be-cropped parts, too. There is no need for qt4 to do this and even more.
> KOffice needs Qt4's text engine, and has been in need for it for at
> least a year.
Does Latex show good text quality? But Latex does not use qt4... How is this possible?
Of course you can do alpha blending without Qt4. And of course you can code a text engine yourself (like Scribus probably does) to get good-looking text with Qt3. But there is no point in wasting lots of efforts to do things that you get for free with Qt4.
Let's not talk just about Latex. What about Qt4. Was it developped with Qt4? Of course not! So everything in Qt4 must be programmable witout Qt4. So why are those KOffice guys so terribly lazy and instead of coding themselves just as the Trolls did?
as i said before, its about wasting time. the reason KDE is such an excelent Desktop Environment, is just because it is easy and efficient to develop for, which makes it fun, too. so - you (anonymous) say: remove the efficiency and fun. well, i think that's a stupid thing to do. Boudewijn is right: why would they start writing these things themselves, only to remove them a few months later???
Aaron, koffice is not such monolitic as you may think. We've new reusable components in koffice/lib/ (I am not talking about KParts): property editor and scripting engine. Python and Ruby (kjs later) are loaded as plugins. Kexi has editor window for each object type (table/query/form/report) defined as a plugin. Database drivers are plugins already used in ShowImg.
Having that, OTOH we're trying not to make things extreme difficult for packagers (versioning!).
OT Note: I agree that we need to keep do releases of KDE3 apps while porting to KDE4. I guess I'll be trying to keep KDE3 and KDE4 branches for some months this year at least in Kexi...
not much time right now, but i'd just like to note that it's not necessary to provide every possible feature (e.g. nice alpha blended selection tool) in the next release.
i'm sure there are other features and improvements that could be made.
in fact, i don't think i can name an app that isn't in need of a complete rewrite that wouldn't have done just fine with a 3.6 release =)
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