miércoles, 5 de noviembre de 2014

Early announce: Qt4 removal in Jessie+1

We the Debian Qt/KDE Team want to early-announce [maintainer warning] our decision to remove Qt4 from Jessie+1. This warning is mostly targeted at upstreams.

Qt4 has been deprecated since Qt5's first release on December 19th 2012, that means almost two years ago!

So far we had bugfixes-only releases, but upstream has announced that they will end this support on august 2015. This already means we will have to do a special effort from that point on for Jessie in case RC bugs appears, so having it in Jessie+1 is simply a non-go.

Some of us where involved in various Qt4 to Qt5 migrations [0] and we know for sure that porting stuff from Qt4 to Qt5 is much much easier and less painful than it was from Qt3 to Qt4.

We also understand that there is still a lot of software still using Qt4. In order to easy the transition time we have provided Wheezy backports for Qt5.

Don't forget to take a look at the C++ API change page [1] whenever you start porting your application.

[0] http://perezmeyer.blogspot.com.ar/2014/03/porting-qt-4-apps-to-qt-5-example-with.html
[1] http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtdoc/sourcebreaks.html

[maintainer warning] **Remember the freeze** and do not upload packages ported to Qt5 to unstable. The best thing you can do now is to ask your upstream if the code can be compiled against Qt5 and, why not, try it yourself.

Our first priority now is to release Jessie, and this is why this is an early announce.

jueves, 9 de octubre de 2014

Qt 5.3.2 in Wheezy-backports: just a few hours away

In more or less 24 hs a few days most of Qt 5.3.2 will be available as a Wheezy backport. That means that if you are using Debian stable you don't need to wait for Jessie: just wait a few hours, add wheezy-backports's repo to your sources.list and get it :)

The rest of Qt 5 will arrive soon.

This is the same version that will be shipped in Jessie, so whatever you develop with it will work with the next Debian stable release :)

Don't forget: you better start porting your Qt4 apps to Qt5!

Note 2014-10-10: uups, it will still take a few days, but it will be there soon :)

Note 2014-10-15: currently building!

martes, 30 de septiembre de 2014

Qt5 in Jessie: we will release with 5.3.2

Qt 5.3.2 has entered testing a few hours ago. This will be the version of Qt we will release with Debian Jessie, and it happens to be a nice coincidence, because upstream focused in stability for the 5.3 branch.

I'll now focus in fixing as many bugs as possible and in backporting Qt5 to Wheezy.

Let me warn you: if you are an upstream for a Qt4 based project be sure to be ready to switch to Qt5. If you are a maintainer of a Qt4 based project you better start asking your upstream to be ready for it :)

jueves, 1 de mayo de 2014

Call for help from Debian's KDE Team

Hi all!


For quite a while now the KDE team has been severely understaffed. We maintain a lot of packages, with many different kinds of bugs, but we don't have enough people to do all the work that needs to be done. We have tools that help us automate the update to new upstream releases, but that's just the tip of the iceberg of our work and so we are writing to invite more people to get involved in the team and help us get KDE software in Debian into better shape.


Some of the tasks that we need help with are:
  • Bug triaging: there are many many bugs in the BTS. We need people that go through them, understand the problem and how to reproduce it, confirm that they are still present in the latest versions. In particular, there are bugs affecting the version in wheezy, and we need people to go through those as well.
  • Bug forwarding: we are so understaffed that we have been asking users to forward the bugs upstream themselves. Some users do this, but some don't. It would help us a lot to have people in the team in charge of this.
  • Patch forwarding: we have quite a bunch of patches applied in the Debian packages that should be applied upstream. Some need to be generalized instead of being Debian-specific. This work would save us time in the future, so it's very important to get it done.
  • Upgrade-testing: in the past, the upgrade from one Debian stable to the other has been quite traumatic for KDE software users. We need people to try upgrading from wheezy to jessie and report any bugs that they might encounter so that we can fix them ahead of the release.
  • Creating patches: many of the bugs that we have require writing patches, some are easy and some are harder, but any help here would be really appreciated.
  • Packaging other KDE apps: we have packages for the core components of KDE software, but there are many other useful components that still need to get packaged.
  • Updating our welcoming wiki page [1], adding these tasks and any future tasks, and unifying the todo lists [2].
If you are interested in helping with any of these, please join our irc channel #debian-qt-kde in irc.oftc.net, or our mailing list [3]. We are happy to help you get started.


     gobby://gobby.debian.org/Teams/KDE/TODO



-- 
Regards,
Maximiliano Curia
On behalf of the KDE team

sábado, 8 de marzo de 2014

Porting Qt 4 apps to Qt 5: an example with QAntenna

As a followup for my previous blog post, I decided to port QAntenna to Qt 5. Here's my experience.

First of all, I ran Qt 5's qmake:

qmake -qt5

Then I just ran make:

make

The first error that appeared was that QFileDialog does not has a setFilters() method. I couldn't find this on on the C++ API change page but looking at the class' documentation I found it was renamed to setSectionsMovable(). Fine, let's just change that and continue compiling.

The next errors came all from the same class QHeaderView. This time the changes are documented in the above linked page, so it was a matter to replace setMovable() with setSectionsMovable() and setResizeMode() with setSectionResizeMode(). Fixed, let's continue.

The following error turned out to be the last one: toAscii() has been deprecated in favor of toLatin1(). Once this was fixed voilá, QAntenna is running with Qt 5.

Easy, wasn't it?

I have just pushed the new version to Debian unstable.

Does your app use Qt4? You better start porting it to Qt5

As you might know, Qt 4 is now in bug-fixes-only maintenance mode. This means that only bug fixes are allowed to be pushed to Qt 4's repository, but no new features.

On the other hand, Qt 5 is already here. Porting existing apps from Qt 4 to Qt 5 is actually easier than it was to port Qt 3 stuff to Qt 4. Take a look at this Qt project's wiki page for more info. Also pay attention at the links at the bottom of it under "Recommended Reading".

Some time ago I blogged about the 5.2.0 status in Debian experimental. We currently have it in testing with a much better status:


And we also have 5.2.1 in experimental with an even better status:

Note: qttools is FTBFS in armhf just because of some symbols changes, it will be fixed on the next upload.
Don't be afraid of getting it from experimental! Take a look at this blog post to know how to compile with Qt 5 in Debian.

Bonus

I have also uploaded Qt Creator built against Qt 5 to experimental. I plan to push it to unstable with Qt 5.2.1.

martes, 11 de febrero de 2014

Qt 5.2.0 in testing

Today we have Qt 5.2.0 in testing, a.k.a. Jessie. On the other hand we are slowly pushing 5.2.1 to experimental.

Enjoy!

P.S.: yes, this is turning more into tweets rather than blog posts :-)

martes, 4 de febrero de 2014

Qt 5.2.0 in unstable

We the Qt/KDE team have the pleasure to announce that we currently have Qt 5.2.0 in unstable. It brings Qt 5 to all official archs in Debian, minus some stuff that needs porting like Qt Webkit.

We hope to get this version in testing soon :-)

domingo, 5 de enero de 2014

Qt 5.2.0 in Debian experimental, now available for more archs

Qt 5.2.0 is already available in experimental until we get a transition slot, but don't be afraid to test it. With this release we had major improvements. With 5.1.1 currently in sid we have the following buildd chart:

Qt 5.1.1 in Debian Sid
Now with 5.2.0 in Debian experimental we have:

Qt 5.2.0 in Debian experimental

As you can see Qt has compiled in more archs, thanks to the effort of the Debian's porters and from the Qt/KDE team.

Note that Qt JS Backend has dissapeared: it's functionality (the javascript engine) is now in Qt Declarative itself. It has been ported away from Google's v8 to a Qt-based engine, allowing it to build in more archs among other features.

You can also note that we still have quite some FTBFS, mostly coming from Qt Webkit. Feel free to send patches ;-)