Announcing Qt Mozilla

Announcing Qt-Mozilla
From: "John C. Griggs" 
To: kde-devel@kde.org
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 10:18:01 +0000


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=
 
(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  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