HEADS UP: KDE/Qt update intentions in Fedora 13 (RFC)

[Jaroslav Reznik]

On Tuesday, October 26, 2010 06:33:09 am Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Oct 2010 21:24:30 +0300
> 
> Kalev Lember <kalev at smartlink.ee> wrote:
> > On 10/20/2010 03:02 PM, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
> > > The question is (we agreed on KDE SIG meeting yesterday) - should we
> > > update Qt to 4.7 too or build KDE stack with current 4.6 series? As
> > > there are a few Qt packages outside of KDE SIG/Qt maintainers scope,
> > > we'd like to hear any objections against update - bugs we can fix
> > > etc. Qt 4.7 is quite well tested, thanks to work on Fedora 14 (Qt
> > > 4.7 is already included) and a lot of users are actually using this
> > > combination in Fedora 13.
> > 
> > KDE is pretty much self contained, whereas a Qt upgrade affects a much
> > larger number of packages. I don't think updating Qt to a new major
> > version in a stable Fedora release is a good idea; it just causes too
> > much churn.
> 
> ...snip...
> 
> I agree with Kalev here. Qt upgrade in a stable release is to be
> avoided unless there's some severe bug or security issue that can't be
> backported.

Top problem is QtWebKit - it's practically impossible to backport security 
issues and as everybody knows - WebKit is security issue itself... It's really 
time consuming task. We hoped we can get standalone QtWebKit by F14/Qt 4.7 but 
upstream is unable to allocate enough resources to support it now.

We're even considering possibility to split QtWebKit from main Qt package and 
build it over the older Qt releases but don't like this idea - it probably will 
bring much more issues than fix (older Qt releases should be supported but no-one 
tests it probably, so problems can't be avoided here).

For Qt itself - once QtWebKit will be separated, need for update would go to 
zero... As the most work is done now on mobile devices support. Only one 
interesting feature for Fedora users has been completed - Qt Quick - it opens a 
lot of new possibilities for rich desktop application development and I think it 
should be path for Fedora too (ala for installer, firstboot, some welcome screen 
etc.).

So with WebKit SIG hat - newer QtWebKit is the must now. 

Jaroslav
 
> kevin

-- 
Jaroslav Řezník <jreznik at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

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