John C. Griggs: Announcing Qt-Mozilla

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