Published on: 2011-06-22T14:18:37+00:00
Pieter Wuille posted a message on the Bitcoin-development mailing list stating that the consensus among the group is to merge autotools and qtgui. However, he mentioned that autotools has not been thoroughly tested on native Windows and OSX platforms. To address this concern, Pieter asked if anyone on the list had experience with either development environment and would be willing to test it. Jaromil re-based his autotools branch against git master and included Mark's NOSIGPIPE/NOSIGNAL patch. People are requested to compile and work on several systems such as Ubuntu, Fedora(? ), mingw cross compile, and OSX. The link for jaromil's autotools branch can be found at https://github.com/jaromil/bitcoin/commits/autotools3. For Pieter, it worked on Ubuntu 10.10 amd64, including wx gui.John Smith wrote an email on June 17, 2011, at 2:42:30 AM, stating that his Qt GUI is almost ready for merging. He has been using it for a while and confirmed that all the functionality works. However, before merging, John wanted to confirm whether the GUI would work without glib support if Qt was built without it.In an email exchange on June 17, 2011, John Smith announced that his Qt GUI was ready for merging. He had been using it for some time and found that all functionalities were working well. However, he wanted to know what the current roadmap was for including the autotools build system so that it would be possible to support multiple GUIs.The consensus among the group was to merge autotools and qtgui. However, there was a concern that autotools had not been tested enough on native Windows and OSX platforms. Therefore, Pieter asked if anyone on the list had experience with either development environment and would be willing to test it out.Luke-Jr and Jeff Garzik are discussing the naming of a Bitcoin client on June 17, 2011. Luke-Jr suggests that they need to come up with a new name for the client if it is going to be strictly Qt. Jeff Garzik responds by saying that he has started calling the github/bitcoin/bitcoin.git the Satoshi Client, whether or not it has a GUI. Jeff Garzik is the founder of exMULTI, Inc. and can be reached at jgarzik at exmulti.com.In a message sent on June 17th, 2011, Gavin Andresen expressed his support for dropping the wxWidgets GUI from the Bitcoin reference client and replacing it with a Qt GUI. He argued that supporting more than one GUI was not a good idea. However, he wanted to ensure that the license for Qt was not an issue since it is LGPL. Andresen also asked John if he was willing to release his code under the Bitcoin MIT license. He then posed a question to everyone else to see if anyone objected to replacing wxWidgets with Qt. Finally, he mentioned that they needed to come up with a new name for the client if they went with Qt.Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, suggests dropping the wxWidgets GUI and replacing it with a Qt GUI for the reference client. He thinks having more than one GUI is not ideal. The license for Qt is not an issue as it is LGPL. However, John's willingness to release his code under the Bitcoin MIT license is still up in the air. Gavin asks if anyone objects to replacing wxWidgets with Qt.The discussion is about merging qt to improve the GUI of Bitcoin. It is mentioned that merging qt will enable real GUI improvements to be made sooner. While discussing the disadvantages, it is pointed out that another GUI would require cleanup of RPC/GUI code changes in three places instead of two, but since there are more people willing to work on qt code than on wx code, it should not be an issue. Luke-Jr notes that the Wallet protocol implementation does not need to touch the GUI code at all except when porting the GUI to use it and hence merging qt should not cause any harm if the code is already written. The email ends with a promotion for EditLive Enterprise - a content authoring tool.In June 2011, Pieter Wuille raised a concern about the disadvantage of adding another GUI in terms of the necessary cleanup of RPC/GUI code. He noted that it would require changes in three places instead of two and suggested that there were more people willing to work on Qt code than wx code. However, he acknowledged that the Wallet protocol implementation might not need to touch the GUI code at all unless porting the GUI to use it. Therefore, he saw no harm in merging the code if it was already written.In an email exchange between John Smith and Pieter, John announces that his Qt GUI is ready for merging.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T02:00:38.848458+00:00