[Qgis-psc] Position on Qt wrt The QT Company announcements

[Nyall Dawson]

On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 at 06:45, Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com> wrote:

> But whatever the outcome of the apparently cool discussions within the board of the KDE Free Qt foundation between the KDE e.v and QT Company representatives, I don't think a statement of support from QGIS.org to the open source side of the QT project would hurt.

+1 to this. I've already had one customer contact me concerned about
this news, and wondering what it meant for QGIS. A blog post showing
our support for the open-source/KDE side of Qt + stating the impact on
QGIS would be helpful all round I think.

My 2c (regarding the impact on QGIS, if this went ahead): Honestly,
it's likely to be minimal. Because:

1. Qt Company really do very little maintenance on the parts of Qt the
QGIS desktop/server applications use. The changelogs for the
core/gui/widget libraries for new Qt releases + patches are very
minimal, and bug reports filed against these components get basically
no attention from Qt Company. Their priorities over the recent years
have been elsewhere (in the embedded + automotive + mobile space), and
all the interesting changes coming into core/gui/widgets are coming
from elsewhere (e.g. KDAB were/are behind the whole qt 3d framework,
and they've already stated that they'd follow a community driven fork
[1])

2. Despite one initial reply on the KDE list stating that there's
insufficient manpower to support a community fork [2], the rest of the
discussion on the qt mailing list is quite positive about the
community's ability to maintain a fork

3. A community fork would likely end up being great for Qt (my
opinion). It certainly had a huge positive impact on
OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Qt is currently REALLY difficult for new
contributors to contribute to, so it's possible a community driven
fork with more of a collaborative focus would see a bunch of new
contributors coming in. Certainly the talk on the Qt mailing lists
over the last 1-2 years has shown a huge amount of dissatisfaction
with the leadership and direction taken by the Qt Company, and
complaints about how out of touch they are with their user's needs.

4. Our releases are generally quite slow to adopt new Qt library
versions anyway, so a 12 month delay from a new release is likely to
have minimal impact (e.g. our Windows builds are based on a version of
qt which is nearly 2 years old). It'd be nice if we updated more
often, but the current situation is reflective of the fact that
there's no particular compelling reasons to upgrade to a more recent
Qt version! Let me rephrase that for emphasis: **in the last 2 years,
there hasn't been ANY change made in Qt which would have had big
enough impact on QGIS users to warrant the effort required for the
package update**.   (Compare that with how far QGIS has come in the
same time frame... I certainly wouldn't recommend that ANYONE even
THINK of running QGIS 3.2 today!!!)

The biggest impact it would have would be on the Qfield and Input
mobile apps, which rely heavily on QML. Qt company **is** actively
working on QML, and these updates are useful -- partly because QML
still has huge feature gaps preventing it being used as a real
alternative to Qt widgets, and partly because it's still buggy and
they are still fixing their messes ;).

Nyall





1. https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006105.html
2. https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006099.html



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