Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
To further support eschwartz's comment: running from source requires that the installed calibre binary be compatible with the source. From time to time changes are made in source that are incompatible with calibre V(yesterday) and require calibre V(today) to be installed. Recognizing this situation takes some experience because the usual symptom is a strange crash. In addition, from time to time there are runtime library changes that fix bugs or add features. The ICU library changes over time are a good example.
Couple this with the fact that calibre now refuses to install on XP as well as refuses to run. This means that as soon as the next calibre runtime changes for whatever reason, XP users will be required to run the portable version of calibre in order to get the up-to-date binary. Although it is possible to run from source using the binaries from the portable version, it isn't completely obvious how to set it up.
Bottom line: keeping XP alive by running from source will require technical expertise. There is no way around it.
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chaley - thanks for that, I didn't realise that the dev environment leant as heavily on the binary install - because I hadn't thought it through. But it makes sense that it does, the alternative is to configuration manage all the third party components, not a task for the faint hearted.
My understanding is that the roadblock to supporting XP is in Qt 5, yet Sigil, which also uses Qt5 (the version theducks has uses 5.3.1), is supported on XP.
I appreciate that Qt is large and that calibre will use Qt features that Sigil doesn't and perhaps vice-versa. But it would helpful to know broadly what it is in Qt that prevents calibre working on XP.
I understand that most of Qt and Sigil are written in C++, whereas most of calibre is written in Python. Which leaves to speculate that the problem lies in the Python wrappers/binders/shims for Qt rather than the base Qt product.
Care to comment?
BR