[Discuss] Desktop Managers

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2014-08-03 17:25-0700 John Blomfield wrote:

> On 08/03/2014 05:02 PM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> Was your second-last sentence above just an aside about porting
>> strictly Qt applications/libraries (such as the PLplot qt device
>> driver) that have nothing to do with KDE from Qt4 to Qt5?  If so,
>> could you comment further about what you have read about the work
>> required to port KDE applications from KDE4 to KDE5?  That might be a
>> much more difficult port than a simple Qt4 to Qt5 port (which in the
>> qt device driver case required no code changes at all).
> I have not looked into the issues in detail but have a look at this
>
> http://qt-project.org/wiki/Transition_from_Qt_4.x_to_Qt5.
>
> http://www.kdab.com/porting-from-qt-4-to-qt-5/
>
> http://www.kdab.com/automated-porting-from-qt-4-to-qt-5/

Hi John:

My point is you have to carefully distinguish between the cases of
using the Qt library API versus using the KDE library API which
basically boils down to whether the code you are working on includes
Qt library headers, KDE library headers or both.

The above 3 URL's are talking about porting from Qt4 to Qt5 which of
course is important to KDE library developers since KDE libraries
directly depend on the Qt API, but should only be of
interest to KDE application developers if those applications use Qt
libraries directly rather than just the KDE libraries.  All the above
URL's indicate Qt4 to Qt5 porting should be straightforward, and that
is consistent with my PLplot qt device experience.

> I believe KDE5 frameworks has been completely rewritten in Qt5.
[...]
> https://community.kde.org/Frameworks/Porting_Notes

In contrast to the above 3 URL's this URL is about porting
applications from KDE4 to KDE5 for the frameworks case, and it looks
like that is a major undertaking because substantial changes to the
KDE API have occurred in this case.  If other parts of the KDE5
libraries have similar large API changes, it appears porting
applications that depend on KDE libraries (as opposed to the much
simpler task of porting applications that just depend on the Qt
libraries) will be a major undertaking in all cases.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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