[scribus] Qt4 and development

[Peter Linnell]

On 10/15/2011 06:56 PM, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> On 10/15/2011 12:02 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 7:48 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>>
>>> whether 1.5.0 will suffer the same issues. Since I am not a developer
>>> all I could say was what my really dim understanding was that I gleaned
>>> from reading this list, i.e., that 1.4.0 has taken so long because of
>>> the need to do a lot of recoding for Qt4.
>>
>> As far as I can tell this is not entirely true. Craig or Franz can
>> prove me wrong, but migration from Qt3 to Qt4 triggered a lot of
>> refactoring that, strictly speaking, was desirable rather than
>> obligatory. And then not all developers could contribute as much as
>> they used to contribute before.
>>
> This is more or less my understanding.
> The problem with 1.4.0 simply relates to tracking down and fixing all
> bugs which are felt to be barriers to release of what will be seen as a
> usable version.
> 
> The track record of Scribus has been that there is no such thing as a
> "promise", only that a release becomes official when it's ready, and not
> before. Invariably, we end up with a period of time when the next
> version is "mostly usable" to "generally satisfactory" to "probably
> advisable compared to the current official stable", and I think we're in
> this last category now.
> 
> Greg

There are many many reasons for the delay.

The port from Qt3 to Qt4 did take significant time, but much of the
refactoring was to take advantage of new features/bug fixes in Qt4.
Hence, even the current RC's are much less crash prone, start faster and
are overall better behaved than the Qt3 versions, especially on
non-Linux platforms like OSX. On OSX, the Qt3 version suffered a lot of
unfixable bugs owing to the immaturity of Qt3 on OSX.

In the past few months, after adding text undo - a much wanted feature
Thanks cezary!, this uncovered some subtle bugs in text layout we are
fixing, plus an issue with the way the canvas is drawn. We've been
fixing these steadily, but some fixes are not easy and need lots of
regression testing.

Expect a new RC in the coming days.

Peter