Bobulate

I feel so conflicted. Just look at that screenshot.

I was considering starting this blog post in a mad-scientist fashion, “mad, was I? they said I was mad to try! haha! and now I shall unleash my creation upon the world and show them all! hahaha!” but I’ve probably done that before. So what you see there in the screenie is probably the first WebKit browser running on Solaris on SPARCv9 hardware. It is the demo browser from Qt 4.7.1. Compiling Qt took just under six hours, I think, but I went shopping in the meantime.
So this is ultimately futile: SPARC hardware just doesn’t get used for the desktop, does it. However, the KDE4-OpenSolaris has had requests from various folks about Qt on SPARC, built with our optimizations and with the Sun Studio compiler. So now it’s here. That is to say, it compiles and some bits run. We still need to figure out how to merge packages so that the IPS repository will spit out a suitable Qt package (either x86 or SPARC). The pkg(5) and pkg.depotd(5) programs know how to handle multiple architectures, I just don’t know how to move the files around to achieve that.
But this exercise isn’t pointless. It shows up how portable Qt is (within the X11 world, anyway). It shows that the packaging setup that the KDE4-OpenSolaris group has set up actually targets the things we said we wanted to hit (which, even after revising away Solaris 10, still includes SPARC). It might help a teensy bit with code quality to consider the warnings a different compiler throws out — although stuff like "textedit.cpp", line 154: Warning: tb hides TextEdit::tb. isn’t useful in my book.
Another thing this experiment shows is that there is more work to be done in catching CStd-based firefox plugins. The Qt demo browser cheerfully tries to load the flash plugin and then falls over because of bad library initialization (when mixing different STLs, see this post of mine for some details) if there’s any interesting media on the page. In the screenshot, we see www.kde.org, which doesn’t do anything fancy.
So there you go. One more platform Konquered (er .. it’ll take another week to get through to KDEbase).

At FSCONS I attended a talk by Johan Thelin — good to see someone whose blog I’ve followed for a long time, but whom I’d never met before — about QtCreator. The talk itself was a bit simple, more a “how to get the toolchain going” than a “deep secrets of Qt creator.” But because I was there I decided to update the OpenSolaris specfile for qtcreator to version 1.2.90 (the latest version for which a source download is available), and it took remarkably little effort to get it going.

Several of the patches from previous versions of the spec had been upstreamed — thanks Ossi — and only the bogus cruft patches remain like dragging in extra libraries and dealing with PTRACE.

The resulting qtcreator.bin works reasonably well — there’s an issue in detecting where Qt is installed, so I had to set that manually and the RPATH isn’t set to include lib/qtcreator/ — which means the method-autocompletion works and it does compile and run an application. I haven’t tried debugging or anything complicated, though.

This bit of Qt coding was in between my talk — on license selection and governance models in Free Software projects, where I was glad to have received useful feedback from the GNU hackers meeting yesterday — and a talk by Christina Haralanova. Just enough time to compile once, and it works.