Advancing Qt on Gentoo: qting-edge
1 Feb 09 at 16:34 | 
gentoo, overlay, qt
Lately I’ve been very busy mainly with Qt related issues on Gentoo. We managed to resolve a good number of open bug reports, and finally came around to marking the split ebuilds for Qt 4.4.2 stable. This was quite a complicated issue, but has been made a lot easier with the recent improvements in dependency resolving in portage.
I also made an appeal for new staff members wanting to help out maintaining Qt and related packages in Gentoo. That got a lot more response than I expected, and as a result I started mentoring a few guys to become new Gentoo developers. Coincidentally there are several Greeks among them — it seems they can’t leave me alone! (FYI: I have lived in Greece for 6 years, did my university degree there, and had a long serious relationship with a Greek girl.) It is nice tho, to reminiscence about the good times I had in Greece, their whacky language and delicious food!
I want to make a special mentioning of Markos Chandras, who has become a very valuable member of the Qt team, and is now on the verge of becoming a full developer. He is a great help in squashing bugs and thinking about how to improve things. We have started a new overlay, called qting-edge
(a name that collaborator Christian Franke came up with), in which we develop new Qt ebuilds and eclasses. We also have ebuilds for the “live” git development version of Qt, and KDE’s patched qt-copy. And we add new applications using Qt4 to the overlay for testing.
It is still my ideal to assemble a light-weight Qt4 desktop, and this overlay is another step into that direction. The overlay contains x11-wm/antico, and while that is a promising project, it certainly isn’t ready for daily use yet. I’m hoping qlwm works better (it certainly is more mature), so that will be my next target. If you know a Qt4 project that you think is interesting for the overlay, or even portage, give me a shout!
