En/TDE tqt3

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TQT3

TDE - Prerequisites

Reading the docs and guides I got the impression that tqt3 is the Qt3 toolkit merged with the tqt-interface library. One of the original goals of the Trinity project consisted of porting TDE to the Qt4 toolkit at least partially. One major improvement often cited consisting of the rendering of web pages with webkit: an evolution of khtml. Usually the coexistence of two distinct releases of the same library while building software is not possible as both class and function names and namespaces are duplicated. The library named tqt-interface was thus introduced as an interface to solve the issue.

The reason for such an introduction was meant to be the first step to a total port of TDE to the Qt4 toolkit. The goal was later abandoned because of the many differences existing between Qt3 and Qt4 and the resulting difficulties in software rewrite. Moreover some tests showed a decrease in performances and reactivity for TDE after the library upgrade. The goal changed into using Qt4 only where it means a significant improvement and keeping Qt3 for every other part of the desktop environment.

TQT3 and Slackware

Figuring that building the tqt3 package should take less than compiling sequentially both Qt3 and tqt-interface, I wrote a build script for the task using the official Qt3 slackbuild script as an example. Configuration files slack-desc and doinst.sh and directory profile.d contents were copied from the TDE build kit for Slackware. Sadly the build kit is not available anymore. The result of my efforts can be found inside the achive linked here.

While writing the script I was somewhat disappointed not to find an up to date release of the source code tqt3 package. The more recent available release being 3.5.13. Both the 3.5.13.1 and 3.5.13.2 cannot be downloaded from the project web site. I could not find an official statement in the documentation and guides, but I suspect the library is not updated anymore. It's only a feeling somewhat supported by the fact that, once built, the resulting package lacks some libraries needed by the desktop environment. In the end tqt3 cannot be used as a basis for a TDE full build for Slackware.

Final Notes

The build script works, but the resulting package contains only part of the libraries it should and is therefore useless for building all depending packages. In the end starting with TQt3 turned out to be a mistake ad a waste of time. Luckily things improved with the remaining part of the project.


For any feedback, questions, errors and such, please e-mail me at studiosg [at] giustetti [dot] net


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Languages: English - Italiano