1 Katie is continuation of the Qt4 C++ toolkit with the goal to keep it alive,
2 clean it up, fix some bugs and backport some features from Qt5. It is based
3 on the latest Git revision of Qt v4.8.
5 There are several things you should be aware before considering Katie:
7 - some components and tools have been removed:
8 - QMake, Linguist, Assistant, checksdk, macdeployqt, pixeltool, qconfig,
9 qdoc, qev, qvfb, runonphone and other non-essential
10 - Qt3Support, QtWebKit, QtHelp, QtXmlPatterns, QtOpenGL, ActiveQt, Phonon and
13 - some things have changed:
14 - QMake build system replaced with CMake
15 - QStyleOption*V{2,3,4} classes have been merged
16 - QIconEngineV{2} classes have been merged
17 - QIconEnginePluginV{2} classes have been merged
18 - QIconEngineFactoryInterfaceV{2} classes and interfaces have been merged
19 - QKeyEventEx and QKeyEvent classes have been merged
20 - QMouseEventEx and QMouseEvent classes have been merged
21 - QGuiPlatformPlugin class is public
22 - zlib, zstd, OpenSSL, PCRE, Freetype and X11 are required for building
23 - OpenSSL, D-Bus, CUPS, resolv and NSL cannot be runtime dependencies, they
24 must be linked to during build
25 - QtUiTools is build as shared library by default
26 - moc, uic, rcc, lrelease, lupdate, etc. are linked to components
27 - updated bundled Harfbuzz from upstream (not Harfbuzz-NG)
28 - updated bundled FFTW and Valgrind from upstream
29 - Symbian, QWS, QPA, Mac and Windows are no longer supported platforms
30 - OpenVG is no longer supported graphics output
31 - Blitter is no longer supported painting engine
32 - native graphics system is no more, rasterizer is just as fast as native
33 - QPicture, QPictureIO and plugins for it are no longer supported
34 - QML debugger and inspector have been removed, potentially dangerous
35 - no SIMD, zero performance impact with decent compiler
36 - state machine is no more
37 - removed non-open source DB2, OCI, TDS and InterBase database drivers
38 - removed 3rd party sources that are very common nowdays
40 - some additions have been made:
41 - JSON classes and types
43 - standard directories handler
44 - building with OpenSSL v1.1+ is possible
45 - building with ICU v59+ is possible
46 - building with IODBC instead of unixODBC is possible
47 - building with LTO is possible and supported, if the toolchain can handle it
48 - building without resolv is possible
49 - alternative libc implementations support
50 - support for generating SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512 hash sums (SHA-2)
51 - faster alternatives to qCompress() and qUncompress()
52 - brief manual pages for all command-line tools
53 - desktop files, Shell profile and dynamic linker/loader config
54 - automatic async DBus calls based on return type, no Q_NOREPLY needed
55 - more reliable qrand(), seeded per thread
56 - improved signal/slot template arguments handling
57 - improved OpenSSL default certificate and certificates directory detection
58 - improved namespaces support and introduced QT_NAMESPACE_COMPAT
59 - script component relies on PCRE instead of internal copy
60 - tests and benchmarks can be run without prior installation
62 Bugs fixed in Katie, some of which in Qt5 too:
63 QTBUG-23502, QTBUG-37115, QTBUG-15052, QTBUG-23522, QTBUG-6139, QTBUG-26889,
64 QTBUG-21548, QTBUG-6133, QTBUG-18188, QTBUG-36767, QTBUG-35387, QTBUG-37035,
65 QTBUG-28321, QTBUG-21993, QTBUG-26590, QTBUG-2124, QTBUG-20482, QTBUG-41361,
66 QTBUG-40153, QTBUG-35479, QTBUG-1628, QTBUG-42989, QTBUG-34861, QTBUG-46767,
67 QTBUG-25114, QTBUG-24672, QTBUG-23524 (WIP), QTBUG-56088, QTBUG-42189,
68 QTBUG-39285, QTBUG-18173, QTBUG-28968, QTBUG-34336, QTBUG-40974, QTBUG-44286,
69 QTBUG-12564, QTBUG-20028, QTBUG-71967, QTBUG-70956, QTBUG-71446, QTBUG-61307
71 Unless you use QMake and QDoc porting to Katie or even supporting it along with
72 Qt4 in the same codebase is trivial and requires only minor changes because
73 Katie is mostly source compatible with Qt 4.8.x, compatibility with releases
74 earlier than that is not a goal. Do note that using libraries that
75 are linked to Qt4 from applications linked to Katie will trigger undefined
78 Should you enouncter a problem please report it at
79 https://github.com/fluxer/katie/issues. For more information about changes,
80 how to handle them and general info please visit
81 https://github.com/fluxer/katie/wiki.