[En-Nut-Discussion] NutCOnf/Qt (was: RFC: Using CMake)

[Harald Kipp]

Hi Thiago,

As this might become a discussion of its own, I changed the subject.

Thiago A. Corrêa wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 7:47 AM, Harald Kipp<harald.kipp at egnite.de> wrote:
>> Actually I'm not sure about wxWidgets anymore, since Nokia changed the
>> Qt license. Remember, that we are waiting about 2 years for wxWidgets 3
>> and there is not even an announcement of its release.
>>
> 
> Interesting you mention it *smile*. I've used Qt for years.

GUI programming is not trivial and the more libs you use, the more
confusing it may become. Most people involved in open source also do
closed projects. Saving the royalties for commercial projects was a plus
of wxWidgets.

>From what I know so far, Qt has a native look. But does it feel native?
Another advantage of wxWidgets is, that it uses native controls, while
Qt uses generic ones. One example is the file select dialog. Unless you
use the optionally available generic wxWidgets dialog, the user will
recognize no difference, whatever platform the application runs on.

There are drawbacks as well. Controls like the nutconf module tree,
which are not available on all targets, never worked flawlessly with all
GUI libs. I saw, that Qt provides such a control.


> I've been working on a substitute to the configurator using Qt. I can
> already load config files, and show the configuration tree like the
> current configurator. Right now I'm missing some of the registry
> settings loading/saving and the build. I would say that I'm 65% done.
> I work on it from time to time, but right now it's on hold for a
> little while.

Really interesting. I planned to spend a weekend to give it a first try.
Looks like you saved me from the basic work.


> Right now I'm keeping it private until I get it fully working (ie,
> building Nut/OS) but I could share the code. I could even make it BSD,
> since it has no link with the GPL'ed one anymore, and I don't like the
> GPL so much, even if write GPL code from time to time.

Nut/OS tools are typically GPL, because they don't need to be included
into the final product. My last experience with GPL was OpenOCD and FTDI
drivers...a nightmare. On the other hand, GNU really helps in cases,
where others try to ignore licenses at all.

Anyway, the original author dictates the license. As far as code has
been taken over from the wxWidgets version, I officially agree here to
use the same code under BSDL as well. However, I stole a lot of things
from the eCos configtool, that was released under GPL. If you like, I
can try to sort this out before we officially release the code.

Harald