5 ms·

<sarcasm> Oh my god. And he/she is forcing me to use this, that too for free? Whatever will I do? Such a waste of his/her time, I demand compensation. </sarcasm

by eklavya 11y ago

<sarcasm> Oh my god. And he/she is forcing me to use this, that too for free? Whatever will I do? Such a waste of his/her time, I demand compensation. </sarcasm> Why so much negativity people? It's a huge undertaking and an awesome accomplishment. Why shouldn't he/she do it? Remember, we are (most of us?) in it for the love of it.

scrollaway 11y ago
It's an obscure fork of a massive project, on an outdated version, with no chance of further support, no VCS, no discussions, no background and no author here to back any of it up. The negativity really shouldn't be a surprise.
- dman 11y ago
  To be perfectly honest a fork in Qt does not surprise me. Most of the people I know who are using Qt use the QWidgets api which has been neglected since 4.8 . Increasingly Qt development appears to be geared for completely new paradigms (Mobile, Scene graphs, Styling via CSS, QML, QtQuick ...) while leaving the core desktop functionality at a stand still.
  - nib952051 11y ago
    Dont be surprised but development of widgets/core libraries wasn't stopped, just fetch qtbase and inspect git logs. Keep in mind that there is QtCreator which based on QtWidgets and unlikelly will be based on something else. What kind of styling, qss? What new widget class do you need?
  - weland 11y ago
    The QWidgets API seemed to work just fine the last time I touched it. I'm not unhappy. I see no reason for a fork. And I've never used QML, QtQuick and all that. I played with them a little, saw absolutely no point in it, and never really needed them. But the QWidgets API is nice, stable and very well documented.
    - dman 11y ago
      Many serious desktop bugs remain unfixed. Perhaps if there was less of a stress on new features, there would be more bandwidth to fixing existing bugs. Here is an example bug - drag and drop with filenames is broken out of the box on Yosemite and has been for quite a while - https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40449 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40449 . Also you just have to go take a look at the comments in the Qt release announcements to see that the views I am expressing here are not an isolated case. Here is an example - https://blog.qt.io/blog/2015/03/17/qt-5-5-alpha-available/#comment-1195322 https://blog.qt.io/blog/2015/03/17/qt-5-5-alpha-available/#c...
      - weland 11y ago
        Fair enough; I was under the impression that the situation was far less serious.
  - nhaehnle 11y ago
    None of this is an argument in favor of a fork. Even if what you write were true (and that hasn't been my impression), somebody would still have to do the work of improving QtWidgets even further. They might as well do that work in Qt itself without producing a fork. It's obvious judging from other comments in this thread that Qt has some problems making people unhappy. However, where those problems are genuine, the author's energy would be better spent to fix those inside Qt rather than creating a new project/fork. (If the goal is actually to help other developers; of course, if all the author wanted was to create an interesting proof of concept, then more power to them.)
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - 0xFFC 11y ago
      no fence , but do you understand what he/she talking about ? Qt (simply) does not allow any changes to Qtwidget code base's . (If I remember correctly) they even freezed Qtwidget API.
      - nhaehnle 11y ago
        What on earth are you talking about? Take a look at the repository mirror here, for example: https://github.com/qtproject/qtbase/ https://github.com/qtproject/qtbase/. You can easily see plenty of commits that change src/widgets. Seriously, please point to where you get these ideas from, because they're just extremely odd and surprising, seemingly coming out of nowhere as if somebody were spreading FUD. (One theory that I have is that there may be confusion about the API and ABI compatibility guarantees that Qt makes. If you're not used to the C++ way of doing things, it's easy to misunderstand their policy. I assure you that there are no artificial limitations to changes in Qt, and if you have concrete grievances with something you should try and get it fixed inside Qt just as with any other open source project.)
- asermersheim 11y ago
  We just found out about this thread 10 minutes ago, and we have been on reddit for the past 8 hours answering questions. We are stunned by the level of interest and feedback. We have been using git from day 1 in house for our version control and that will be available to the public shortly. We have been focusing on outreach to the local SF Bay area developer community, and we presented CopperSpice at the SF Bay Area Association of C/C++ users meeting in February. You are welcome to peruse the meeting notes and our slides: http://www.meetup.com/SFBay-Association-of-C-C-Users/events/218656595/ http://www.meetup.com/SFBay-Association-of-C-C-Users/events/... https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sxei-Em6cnYbE0Zj16j6gwF4SIvGJIE_1tb4P78RN3o/edit?pli=1#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sxei-Em6cnYbE0Zj16j6... In terms of 'backing any of it up', the code speaks for itself. I am happy to answer any specific questions you may have.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Ok, I went through your presentation, it does give more background. Let me re-raise my concerns. - You are based on Qt 4.x. Why? The 5.x branch is better in every respect (yes, bugs, but that's fixable). This project is breathing life into a version of the lib which really should be dead. I think this is a net negative for Qt. - Why is this the first most of us in the Qt community hear about it? The project is basically coming out of nowhere, imposing itself as this shiny new thing when it has critical flaws and the only point of contact is an email address and a forum with 0 posts in it. Feels like it was developed in complete secrecy. - (minor) Autotools build system, really? You're not going to get much respect about this from most Qt devs. Why not just use cmake? - I'm concerned about the entire way this project came forward. You don't have a git repository. You claim you will but claiming things is easy - the question it immediately raises is why don't you have a git repository yet? (And this comes back to what I was saying earlier about developing this in secret). The lack of a repository is the second most important issue after 4.x, I think. Git repos aren't just "the code". They're insight into how development happens (are commits clean and readable? is it easy to contribute?), insight into who contributes (is it a corp? how many people are working on this?), into whether upstream changes are being pulled down, etc.
    - 11y ago

by eklavya 11y ago

scrollaway 11y ago

It's an obscure fork of a massive project, on an outdated version, with no chance of further support, no VCS, no discussions, no background and no author here to back any of it up. The negativity really shouldn't be a surprise.

dman 11y ago
To be perfectly honest a fork in Qt does not surprise me. Most of the people I know who are using Qt use the QWidgets api which has been neglected since 4.8 . Increasingly Qt development appears to be geared for completely new paradigms (Mobile, Scene graphs, Styling via CSS, QML, QtQuick ...) while leaving the core desktop functionality at a stand still.
- nib952051 11y ago
  Dont be surprised but development of widgets/core libraries wasn't stopped, just fetch qtbase and inspect git logs. Keep in mind that there is QtCreator which based on QtWidgets and unlikelly will be based on something else. What kind of styling, qss? What new widget class do you need?
- weland 11y ago
  The QWidgets API seemed to work just fine the last time I touched it. I'm not unhappy. I see no reason for a fork. And I've never used QML, QtQuick and all that. I played with them a little, saw absolutely no point in it, and never really needed them. But the QWidgets API is nice, stable and very well documented.
  - dman 11y ago
    Many serious desktop bugs remain unfixed. Perhaps if there was less of a stress on new features, there would be more bandwidth to fixing existing bugs. Here is an example bug - drag and drop with filenames is broken out of the box on Yosemite and has been for quite a while - https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40449 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40449 . Also you just have to go take a look at the comments in the Qt release announcements to see that the views I am expressing here are not an isolated case. Here is an example - https://blog.qt.io/blog/2015/03/17/qt-5-5-alpha-available/#comment-1195322 https://blog.qt.io/blog/2015/03/17/qt-5-5-alpha-available/#c...
    - weland 11y ago
      Fair enough; I was under the impression that the situation was far less serious.
- nhaehnle 11y ago
  None of this is an argument in favor of a fork. Even if what you write were true (and that hasn't been my impression), somebody would still have to do the work of improving QtWidgets even further. They might as well do that work in Qt itself without producing a fork. It's obvious judging from other comments in this thread that Qt has some problems making people unhappy. However, where those problems are genuine, the author's energy would be better spent to fix those inside Qt rather than creating a new project/fork. (If the goal is actually to help other developers; of course, if all the author wanted was to create an interesting proof of concept, then more power to them.)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0xFFC 11y ago
    no fence , but do you understand what he/she talking about ? Qt (simply) does not allow any changes to Qtwidget code base's . (If I remember correctly) they even freezed Qtwidget API.
    - nhaehnle 11y ago
      What on earth are you talking about? Take a look at the repository mirror here, for example: https://github.com/qtproject/qtbase/ https://github.com/qtproject/qtbase/. You can easily see plenty of commits that change src/widgets. Seriously, please point to where you get these ideas from, because they're just extremely odd and surprising, seemingly coming out of nowhere as if somebody were spreading FUD. (One theory that I have is that there may be confusion about the API and ABI compatibility guarantees that Qt makes. If you're not used to the C++ way of doing things, it's easy to misunderstand their policy. I assure you that there are no artificial limitations to changes in Qt, and if you have concrete grievances with something you should try and get it fixed inside Qt just as with any other open source project.)
asermersheim 11y ago
We just found out about this thread 10 minutes ago, and we have been on reddit for the past 8 hours answering questions. We are stunned by the level of interest and feedback. We have been using git from day 1 in house for our version control and that will be available to the public shortly. We have been focusing on outreach to the local SF Bay area developer community, and we presented CopperSpice at the SF Bay Area Association of C/C++ users meeting in February. You are welcome to peruse the meeting notes and our slides: http://www.meetup.com/SFBay-Association-of-C-C-Users/events/218656595/ http://www.meetup.com/SFBay-Association-of-C-C-Users/events/... https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sxei-Em6cnYbE0Zj16j6gwF4SIvGJIE_1tb4P78RN3o/edit?pli=1#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sxei-Em6cnYbE0Zj16j6... In terms of 'backing any of it up', the code speaks for itself. I am happy to answer any specific questions you may have.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Ok, I went through your presentation, it does give more background. Let me re-raise my concerns. - You are based on Qt 4.x. Why? The 5.x branch is better in every respect (yes, bugs, but that's fixable). This project is breathing life into a version of the lib which really should be dead. I think this is a net negative for Qt. - Why is this the first most of us in the Qt community hear about it? The project is basically coming out of nowhere, imposing itself as this shiny new thing when it has critical flaws and the only point of contact is an email address and a forum with 0 posts in it. Feels like it was developed in complete secrecy. - (minor) Autotools build system, really? You're not going to get much respect about this from most Qt devs. Why not just use cmake? - I'm concerned about the entire way this project came forward. You don't have a git repository. You claim you will but claiming things is easy - the question it immediately raises is why don't you have a git repository yet? (And this comes back to what I was saying earlier about developing this in secret). The lack of a repository is the second most important issue after 4.x, I think. Git repos aren't just "the code". They're insight into how development happens (are commits clean and readable? is it easy to contribute?), insight into who contributes (is it a corp? how many people are working on this?), into whether upstream changes are being pulled down, etc.
  - 11y ago