Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
@chaley - thanks for that, I didn't realise that the dev environment leans on the binary install, but it makes sense that it does.
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
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TBH I don't know, and I don't have the time or energy to try to find out. What I can say is that there have been a large number of bug reports and complaints on this forum. Kovid has clearly decided that it isn't worth the potentially unbounded amount of his time to work out why calibre has problems on XP. That is his privilege. It is also a choice I can understand. Should he support XP or work on improving the editor? Should he support XP or work on a client/server calibre? Should he support XP or work on fixing graphics problems on modern operating systems?
It is very possible that I will need to make a similar choice with Calibre Companion and Gingerbread (Android 2.3). Supporting Gingerbread causes no end of headaches to support around 5% of our installed base. Is that worth it? Do we continue to limit what we can do for 95% of our users to support people using a version of Android that has been dead for a long time? Or alternatively, do we in effect build two apps, one for Android 4 and one for Android <4? Tough choices, but ones that will be made one way or the other will he nill he.