[LV2] plea to plugin UI devs

[Rui Nuno Capela]

hi Robin,

On 03/17/2016 20:49 PM, Robin Gareus wrote:
> On 03/17/2016 06:24 PM, Rui Nuno Capela wrote:
> 
>> otoh. gtk2/3 and qt4/5 toolkits, are, have been distributed, deployed
>> and available as shared resources,
> 
> And there is about zero ABI compatibility guarantee among all those
> available distributed, deployed versions.
> 

sure you don't need gtk2 and gtk3 or qt4 and qt5 ABI compatibility at 
all--the fact they might co-exist under the same environment doesn't 
imply you're allowed to mix both in the same process address-space--in 
fact you can't mostly because there will be unrecoverable symbol clashes 
and/or assert()ions that fail, not quite one of ABI incompatibility.

as a matter of fact, i see it all as a non-issue re. qt4/qt5 at least.
dunno about ardour and gtk2/gtk3 though, maybe that's the lurking 
problem?.

you have to realize that gtk2 or qt4 are phased-out and all systems will 
be fully gtk3 and qt5 in the near future, a very near future on the qt5 
front--on my watch, everything is already, there present, no looking 
back ;)


>> and let's not go the gtk2 vs. gtk3 or qt4 vs. qt5 dilemma: this is a
>> packaging/deployment/roll-out decision, not a developer, architect or
>> even a design one
> 
> I think you'll change your mind once there's a qtractor port for BSD,
> OSX and Windows etc and you start porting your vee-one plugins to all
> those platforms.
> 

one can never say never but that is a very unlikely event to occur in 
this universe where qtractor run.
unless someone gets ALSA-MIDI (alsa_seq API) fully ported to anything 
but Linux :)

as said before too many times and again. all of (my) qstuff* including 
qtractor and all the vee-ones, are there built on default to qt5 
already. however there's still this configure --enable-qt4 option 
avaialable for anyone who's stubborn enough to keep fighting on the qt4 
arena :)


> Packagers cannot take care of ABI stability. That begins and ends with
> the developer.
> 

and so that's why me as a developer, made the call. qt4 is dead. long 
live qt5.
other's will follow as they will regret if they don't.
there's no way back in the progress of time.
not even for LV2 host/plugin UI developers :)

cheers
-- 
rncbc aka. Rui Nuno Capela