Re: Qt4 on diet or to hell

Hello Rafael,

I'm sorry for jumping into the discussione so late.

On 26/01/2021 09:45, Rafael Sadowski wrote:
> Hi Qt4 lovers,
>
> qucs-s in the only Qt4 consumer left in our CVS tree. I have spoken with
> the maintainer and he told me that the port is actively used (not only
> from him). It looks like cad/qucs-s is the only functional GUI for
> SPICE-like simulators on OpenBSD.
>
> To be honest Qt4 applications are looking a little bit broken.
>
> Alessandro De Laurenzis has described this here:
> https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=160733053308591&w=2
>
> I see two options.
>
> Number 1: We say goodbye to Qt4/qucs-s and delete it.
>
> Number 2: We deactivate everything that is possible and not needed by
> qucs-s. This means that we have to live with the Qt4 issue. I will not
> invest any time.

This is the real point, actually. As I described in [1], the same
symptoms that I observe in qucs-s seem to affect qtconfig4, which is an
integral part of the *library* (it would be good if someone could
confirm this...)

So, AFAICS, we have a broken qt4 subsystem at the moment; and, because
of that, qucs-s is completely unusable. In these conditions, I don't see
the point in keeping it into the tree.

qucs-s is more than a GUI for SPICE-based simulators (ngspice in our
case); it is a kind of integrated environment for circuital analysis
and, in this respect, it is close to be a "unique" project. Without it,
we have only a few alternatives in our ports:

1) kicad (and specifically eeschema): a bit bloated, if you ask me, but
probably still usable;

2) xschem (for schematic capture only; it can also act as a very
primitive simulator launcher).

So, even it is my preferred solution, qucs-s isn't essential.

But let me stress my point once more: either we preserve the qt4
subsystem (possibly limiting the tree content to what qucs-s strictly
needs) and *actively maintain it*, i.e. investing time in bug fixing
and/or patch back-porting from upstream, or we remove it completely,
including qucs-s.

My few cents

[1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=160733053308591&w=2

--
Alessandro De Laurenzis
[mailto:just22@atlantide.mooo.com]
Web: http://www.atlantide.mooo.com
LinkedIn: http://it.linkedin.com/in/delaurenzis