John C. Griggs: Announcing Qt-Mozilla

Apr 17, 2001, 15:57 (32 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by John C. Griggs)

Subject: Announcing Qt-Mozilla
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 10:14:30 +0000
From: "John C. Griggs" <johng@corel.com>

Greetings,

I am pleased to (finally) announce the availability of Qt-Mozilla. This port is now part of the regular Mozilla source tree, available from www.mozilla.org.

The port is reasonably complete and functional (I will list known bugs and defficiencies later), but has not been extensively tested, so please feel free to download it, build it and try it out!!

Please feel free to post to netscape.public.mozilla.qt/ (which I monitor daily) if you have questions or comments, but please report all bugs and submit all patches and code enhancements through Bugzilla
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/). You can assign Bugzilla reports related to Qt-Mozilla to me, johng@corel.com. Requirements:
The Qt port of Mozilla has the same basic requirements as the Gtk port (with the obvious exception of the Gtk/Glib libraries themselves) and requires Qt 2.2.0 or better. I have tested with Qt 2.2.0 only, myself. There is a test in Mozilla's configuration script (configure) to make sure that the Qt version is 2.2.0 or greater. Configuration:
To configure Mozilla to build the Qt port, use the following options to configure:

--without-gtk

(This option is required to completely turn off Gtk support in the build tree.)

--with-qt

--enable-toolkit=qt

(These two options turn on Qt support in the build tree.)

--disable-tests

(The Qt port does not include extra widgets (nsButton, etc.) that are required by the test programs but are not used by Mozilla itself. Anyone interested in bringing these additional widget classes up to date should use the code in nsScrollbar.cpp and nsScrollbar.h as a guideline for writing the nsWidget and QWidget sub-classes required for each additional widget type. These classes must also be added back into the Makefile and the component array in nsWidgetFactory.cpp. Please submit any patches back to me via Bugzilla.)

--with-qtdir=<path_to_qtdir>

(This option is required if the Qt headers and libraries are not in the default search paths for your compiler and linker. If you have the QTDIR environment variable correctly configured, you can use: --with-qtdir=$QTDIR, otherwise <path_to_qtdir> should point to the parent directory for the lib and include directories where Qt resides on your system.)

Known Bugs, Defficiencies and Things I haven't Looked At Yet:
Widget:

• Some CSS2 and CSS3 cursor shapes are not yet supported.
• I haven't looked into XIM support yet. I know Qt provides support for this extension, but I haven't looked at what would be required to expose this in Mozilla.
• I have not looked into XRemote support yet and I am not sure whether or not it makes any sense (or would be possible) under Qt.
• No Xinerama support. It looks like Qt won't support this until v3.0, anyway.
• No support for plugins yet. This has to be developed for both Netscape 4.x and Mozilla style plugins.
• No Splash screen.
• No support for Bi-Directional Keyboards.

GFX:

• No support for printing.
• No support for XPrint. I haven't looked into whether this makes any sense (or is possible) under Qt.
• Unicode font/charset support is incomplete.
• The GFX code should probably be reviewed for completeness and performance. It is some of the oldest code in the port.

Timers:

• Timer priority is not supported.

General:

• No sound support yet.
• I haven't looked into building Qt-Mozilla with Qt/Embedded or Qt/Windows yet. There is some small amount of X11-specific code in the current source, but it is all for debugging or plugin support and could easily be #ifdef'ed out for other platforms. If anyone tries this out, please submit patches for any changes to me via Bugzilla.
• There is a bug on some platforms that causes Qt to be incorrectly initialized when Mozilla initially runs and registers all of it's component libraries. The symptom is that system colours are incorrect (on my system, the background of text widgets goes black). Restarting Mozilla fixes this problem.

---

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Gtk-Mozilla team (Chris Blizzard and Ramiro Estrugo), Daniel "Leaf" Nunes, Brendan Eich, Chris Seawood and everyone else at Mozilla.org for their help and support and for putting up with all of my silly questions. I would also like to dedicate this release to Joey Ramone (who died April 15, 2001 of lymphoma at age 49), Robert Fripp and King Crimson. Their music made the (seemingly) endless debugging bearable and was a constant source of energy and inspiration...

Anyway, I hope you will take the time to try Qt-Mozilla out!!

Regards,

John Griggs