Qt Opens Source Code Repositories
sobral writes "Following the announcement of the LGPL license model, since yesterday the Qt source code repositories are open to the public together with their roadmap. The contribution model is online and will enable developers from the community to submit patches through a single click process, avoiding the previous hassle of sending in signed paperwork. The code is hosted at qt.gitorious.org and an instant benefit of this launch is that Qt Software has been working together with Gitorious maintainers for the last four months to improve Gitorious and all these new features are already submitted upstream."
I hope Gnome switches to Qt one day, its so much nicer than GTK.
I have to say, I'm glad of this trend lately for open source projects to primarily publish their source through Git, and particularly through these very able Git hosting sites like gitorious and github. If you've worked with CVS and SVN open-source projects most of your career, the experience is simply incomparable. With the way Git works, and particularly with the implementations the hosting companies provide, it's very easy to fork a project, make the changes you want, and always have the power to commit to a remote repository that not only keeps track of all your commits but ALSO how all your commits relate back to the original forked project...
Instead of downloading someone's tarball and (maybe) emailing them a diff (or just posting your own duplicate of their source with your little changes), it's like you're making a shadow copy of a projects source, where you have all the control but no information is duplicated or lost.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It does have a certain shitness to the look, for some reason, at least in KDE. I noticed a while back that a bug was fixed in KDE 4 that rendered stuff with too many borders -- so when a widget was inside another widget, or adjoining another widget, they would both render a border. Kind of hoped that would solve the vague cluttered/weird/awkward feel, but it's hard to tell, since KDE 4 went with the horrible Oxygen theme which could make any widget library look like crap. I suspect Qt itself can still look very nice though. I don't mind the look of Google Earth, for instance, and QtDesigner is quite nice in places at least, though simplistic, even WITH it's horrible KDE4-like colors etc.
That said, Qt is way more than than a widget look/theme. It's a very nice OO library for cross-platform GUI (and non-GUI) applications, with modern threading and event-driven programming support, etc. It's one of the few libraries that make me even consider using C++ these days, as opposed to nicer, more rapid languages like python++. I also think that, if GNOME had used a library of similar quality** and similar OO features, then the GNOME desktop, and Free Software in general, would probably be a lot more advanced at this stage.
++ Yes, I know PyQt is available
** Yes, I know that GNOME was a reponse to Qt's early licenses, and that Harmony didn't pan out
What can I say... Qt is becoming a dream platform thanks to Nokia's insight!
- a powerful language/library (C++)
- real cross-platform
- support for embedded and mobile applications (a great alternative for the difficult Symbian C++ language)
- open source and nice licence (LGPL)
- exemplar own IDE but also Eclipse/VS integration
- additional languages supported
What else could one ask?!
"Sum Ergo Cogito"