[thg-dev] reasons behind pyqt port decision

[jmiguelhdez]

Out of Curiosity, why is the porting a good idea?
Is it more features, stability, good looking?

I tried to find more info on the mailing list using qt and pyqt as
keywords but i only found the announcements:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.tortoisehg.devel/7847/focus=7870
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.general/19743

And some very old mail of TK about not going for qt

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.tortoisehg.devel/1358

Any comment? please?

Thanks

[Steve Borho]

It's been our experience that Win32 support for GTK has been
suboptimal for some time (rendering glitches, etc) and declining in
quality. While the support for native Mac OS X has been stalled and
never released.

Switching to Qt has given us better support for both platforms.

As the port has progressed, we've been happily discovering features
that never worked properly in GTK but now work well with Qt (hello
drag & drop, etc). But that was not the impetus behind the switch.

If you're looking for the straw that broke the proverbial camel's
back, it was this:

http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/issue/1002/use-native-theme-engine-libwimpdll
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=598299

--
Steve Borho

[Yuya Nishihara]

Steve Borho wrote:
> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 9:09 AM, jmiguelhdez <jmigue...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Out of Curiosity, why is the porting a good idea?
> > Is it more features, stability, good looking?
> >
> > I tried to find more info on the mailing list using qt and pyqt as
> > keywords but i only found the announcements:
> >
> > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.tortoisehg.devel/7847/focus=7870
> > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.general/19743
> >
> > And some very old mail of TK about not going for qt
> >
> > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.tortoisehg.devel/1358
> >
> > Any comment? please?
>
> It's been our experience that Win32 support for GTK has been
> suboptimal for some time (rendering glitches, etc) and declining in
> quality. While the support for native Mac OS X has been stalled and
> never released.
>
> Switching to Qt has given us better support for both platforms.

Just FYI, the original discussion was:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.general/19475/focus=19490

Yuya,

[Adrian Buehlmann]

Quite some time has passed since TortoiseHg decided to go for GTK back then.

An open source project is also about attracting developers. Since we all
decide for ourselves what we hack unpaid for, we have to make sure we
are using an attractive platform. The pendulum seems to swing to the Qt
side right now.

The GTK based code is still there and I guess if anyone wants to work on
it they can do it. But the current major TortoiseHg contributors seem to
agree on pursuing the PyQt track. I guess I can safely say we are a bit
fed up of GTK.

At least we don't seem to be the only mercurial GUI that switches from
GTK to PyQt: apparently, hgview has done the switch too and other DVCS
GUIs are Qt based too. So we are not alone, which sometimes is good hint
for not being completely on the wrong track :-)

[jmiguelhdez]

Great Answers, Thanks
They are exactly what i was looking for :)

Thanks also for the effort, porting is always a hell of a task and we
(the community) will get the benefit of it.

On May 13, 10:06 am, Adrian Buehlmann <adr...@cadifra.com> wrote:
> On 13.05.2010 16:26, Yuya Nishihara wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Steve Borho wrote:

> >> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 9:09 AM, jmiguelhdez <jmiguel.h...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Out of Curiosity, why is the porting a good idea?
> >>> Is it more features, stability, good looking?
>
> >>> I tried to find more info on the mailing list using qt and pyqt as
> >>> keywords but i only found the announcements:
>

> >>>http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.tortoise...
> >>>http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.general/...

>
> >>> And some very old mail of TK about not going for qt
>

> >>>http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.tortoise...

>
> >>> Any comment? please?
>
> >> It's been our experience that Win32 support for GTK has been
> >> suboptimal for some time (rendering glitches, etc) and declining in
> >> quality.  While the support for native Mac OS X has been stalled and
> >> never released.
>
> >> Switching to Qt has given us better support for both platforms.
>
> > Just FYI, the original discussion was:

> >http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.mercurial.general/...