[gentoo-dev] Qt4 portage update

[Caleb Tennis <caleb@gentoo.org>]

With the pending release of Qt4 very soon, I wanted to take a moment to update 
the community on what kind of effect it will have on portage:

First, the installation is now FHS compliant - no more stuff going 
into /usr/qt.

Previous Qt versions built one big library; this version builds 9 or 10 
smaller ones (all installed into /usr/lib/qt4).  Since the names are 
different, as well as the sonames, there should not be any runtime linking 
issues with a mixed installation.

Qt4 does not make use of the QTDIR environment variable like Qt3 did.  This 
means that automated build scripts, such as those with most KDE programs, 
will still pick up the correct Qt3 programs (uic, moc, and qmake).  For 
programs that don't use these types of build scripts, ebuild modifications 
may need to be made to tell the package which directory to pick up its binary 
tools in (/usr/qt/3/bin for Qt3, /usr/bin for Qt4).

I currently don't have any plans for any type of xxx-config package to switch 
between versions.  After installing Qt4, those applications will be higher in 
precedence in the PATH.  If you need to run Qt3 applications, you will either 
need to specify the full path or restructure your PATH to make it work.

Even though Trolltech split out the GUI libraries from the rest of the core 
libraries, X11 is still a dependency for the whole package.  The reason for 
this is that, as of now, Trolltech hasn't provided a convenient way to build 
a subset of the libraries - it's really an all or nothing thing.  Eventually 
once the development stabilizes a bit, I think it will be feasible to have a 
gui and non-gui set of ebuilds.

All that said - the latest version in portage ( qt-4.0.0_rc1-r2 ) works and 
installs great for me.  At this point, it may be good for aches to try 
testing the installation, as well as people who use non-traditional setups, 
like icc, ulibc, or "interesting" CXXFLAGS.

At the moment, I don't know of any installable applications that make use of 
this new Qt version, but they'll be springing up very soon.  Hopefully we'll 
be ready for them.

Thanks,
Caleb
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