[haiku-development] Re: Haiku, Qt and apps, oh my!

  • From: Alexandre Deckner <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:31:59 +0100

Ingo Weinhold wrote:
On 2009-03-28 at 01:25:45 [+0100], Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Jason Todd Slack-Moehrle
1. Since Qt (by Trolltech/Nokia) is now LGPL, what about a port of Qt to run on Haiku? I thought about this a while ago. Would it be beneficial? I could
take on this task.
In my opinion porting such widget frameworks is just an invitation for
a bunch of sub-par ports of Linux software. I don't want to see Haiku
become the equivalent of another Linux distro. Therefore I think it is
better to have native apps, and ports should only be used to tide us
over. I think one of the major problems with Linux is having too many
options and therefore no consistency. The whole GTK/Qt/Motif/etc GUI
thing is just one example of many.

IMHO, Qt is a must-have. It's a pretty solid API -- definitely better than some parts of the Be API (like my "favorite", the interface kit) -- and by far more complete.

I have no illusions that the "tiding us over" with ports is a temporary state only. I believe that having at least one or two of the major toolkits available on Haiku is simply a necessity.
I agree, and the world as changed in 10 years, we can't ignore we're in a multiplatform world, surrounded by lots of big opensource competitors, where an exclusively BeAPI system can't satisfy/seduce everyone. It's up to us to make the integration of such toolkits seamless and even make those libs perform better than on linux/bsd eventually. That's a kind of interoperability, at another level. The way i see it, at some point, we should be able to say that any software, lib or language runs better on Haiku than elsewhere. I don't see any technical problem that would prevent that, given enough determination and time.

Alex

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