LeanQt VS aqtinstall

> Then do you (developers on HN) stay away from CLAs?

Depends on the CLA, but generally I do stay away. E.g. I never checked in anything to the official Qt repository because I don't agree the the CLA by QTC. Instead I finally made my own fork and call it LeanQt and LeanCreator (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ and https://github.com/rochus-keller/leancreator/).

The "weird licence which is basically a modified version of the MIT licence but with a clause that prevents competitive usage" is likely not even recognized as a true "open source" license.

> would it be possible to relicense a fork of Polaris to MIT (removing the Shopify clause?)

Likely not, because only the IP owner can determine who can do what with their IP under what license. If you use the software of an IP owner under a specific licence, you usually don't have the rights to re-license their work, even if you modified it.

My response to this question was https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt, but I'm not using QML nor xmlpatterns.

I made myself independent of the adventures in Qt Land by switching to https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt.

https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt

A minimum and easy to build fork of QT

If you (like me) don't need all that stuff and are not up to the latest craze, have a look at LeanQt (https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt).

Right. In the Gui module you have everything you need for this: platform independent windows and events, 2D bitmap and vector graphics, fonts and even rich text handling. Unfortunately there are some dependencies in Qt Gui to Qt Widgets, but if you use e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ instead of original Qt these are resolved. So with this you can implement your own widget toolkit on top of the Gui module if you want, and still benefit from the very powerful platform independent foundations of Qt.

> Qt for MCU [..] seems like a big advantage over Qt LGPL-3.0. I have my doubts. MCUs powerful enough to run Qt GUIs smoothly are more expensive than, say, an i.MX6ULL with a Cortex-A7 application processor and Linux. It’s a lot easier to find developers for an embedded Linux system ...

This is a very convincing argument. A Linux embedded system is also more flexible and the degree of code reusability is usually higher.

> Shall we use Qt LGPL-3.0 or Qt Commercial?

LeanQt (https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/) is still available under LGPL v2.1. I will not switch to Qt 6 with my projects.

I've used aqt[1] before but it doesn't look like it's seeing 5.15.11 yet, just 5.15.2.

[1]: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

Don't use the Qt installer. It sucks. It's only reason is to annoy people and collect your data. Use aqt: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

I mostly disagree. Like you said, Qt is the best native GUI toolkit available today. And that is a hard achievement. There are many tradeoffs (some you pointed out) but the open source community seems to find a way around those limitations. There are thousands of open source libraries you can plug-in into your Qt app to overcome many of its limitations (although some remain, like how can't we still not easily change caret/cursor color of QTextEdit??).

Unlike you, I like the direction where Qt is taking. I think QML and Qt Quick are great. I just implemented a feature in my note-taking app that turns Markdown text into Kanban board using QML and the experience has been great (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574). I'm planning to continue transition from QWidgets to QML/Qt Quick.

I do worry of the continuous friction with open source development and hate the online installers as well. I can recommend this useful tool https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall that allows you to easily download prebuilt Qt binaries. I hope they can revert their approach on that.

Install the qt binaries from the command line https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall will help you with that.

you can install it from vcpkg or conan (or https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall if you really want the official Qt binaries) and it'll be much less

Is there any particular reason why you want to build Qt yourself? This is usually quite painful and requires a lot of extra stuff (see https://wiki.qt.io/Building\_Qt\_6\_from\_Git) . If you just want to avoid the (horrible) official installer and a Qt account, you can use aqtinstaller to fetch everything you need: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

Just recently, I had to recompile a (singleplayer) save game editor. So basically a GUI that does some clever hex editing.

It was written in C++ using Qt.

Have you ever tried compiling a Qt program on Windows? It involves signing up for an official Qt developer account to even install qmake.

To the point I had to use an unofficial Qt installer CLI app (aqtinstall) [0] to even install the toolchain to build this little shitty app... which still relied on having several Qt .dll files in the same directory as the .exe to work.

Have you clicked on [0] yet? Well, then guess what programming language aqtinstall uses.

[0] https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall