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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: KDE backward compatibility issue
From:       Milian Wolff <mail () milianw ! de>
Date:       2015-02-04 18:57:39
Message-ID: 2351421.4YxhC047pg () milian-kdab2
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On Wednesday 04 February 2015 21:49:15 Vasily Khoruzhick wrote:
> Hi Milian,
> 
> On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 9:04 PM, Milian Wolff <mail@milianw.de> wrote:
> > If these apps link against Qt5 statically (which they can, assuming they
> > pay the license fees to Digia), then they will need to recompile and
> > release an updated version. If otoh they just ship they own set of libs
> > and adapt LD_PRELOAD or similar, then one can still exchange the
> > libraries.
> 
> They link dynamically, and I tried to replace Qt libraries for Viber,
> but it just crashes
> somewhere inside their binary.

Considering that Qt is backwards compatible, this should not happen if they 
did not add any BIC changes. Anyhow, to comply with the LGPL, I think you can 
demand their sources with these potential changes. Also, they might tell you 
how they compiled Qt5 - potentially they disabled some features which lead to 
ABI differences.

> > And, if they do this, then they need to do this regularly anyways to
> > benefit from the bug fixes and potential security fixes in Qt upstream.
> 
> We're living in real world, and most companies aren't interested in
> supporting Linux well enough.
> Viber version wasn't updated for quite a while, and I don't believe
> that they will release an update anytime soon.
> 
> Anyway, fixing every application instead of fixing it at the lower
> level doesn't sound reasonable.

"Every application"? You mention two. And if they, or others, don't care about 
us, why should we go out of our way to care for them? Additionally, as others 
said, if someone cares enough for these applications, then patches will most 
certainly be reviewed and integrated. But you cannot demand this from the KDE 
or Qt community to magically happen.

Bye
-- 
Milian Wolff
mail@milianw.de
http://milianw.de

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