Debian Works Towards Upstream Qt4 ARM 64-bit Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Works Towards Upstream Qt4 ARM 64-bit Support

Debian developers are trying to land upstream support for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) in the Qt tool-kit...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTYzMTA

[FLHerne]

Good. This might force them to make a 4.9 release and quit blocking other feature patches.

Their "no (even minor) improvements in 4.8.x, but no 4.9 release" policy is quite irritating.

[carewolf]

Good. This might force them to make a 4.9 release and quit blocking other feature patches.

Their "no (even minor) improvements in 4.8.x, but no 4.9 release" policy is quite irritating.

Not really, OS X Mavericks also broke everything like a mad elephant on crack, and support for the Maverick crack elephant has been merged into what is becoming 4.8.6

[FLHerne]

Not really, OS X Mavericks also broke everything like a mad elephant on crack, and support for the Maverick crack elephant has been merged into what is becoming 4.8.6

Depends how they see it. Mavericks is just an update to an already-supported platform (and likely to be installed on machines where Qt apps work already), whereas AArch64 devices have never been supported and won't break any existing users.

[DrYak]

Depends how they see it. Mavericks is just an update to an already-supported platform (and likely to be installed on machines where Qt apps work already), whereas AArch64 devices have never been supported and won't break any existing users.

On the other hand Mavericks changed some of the OS API, Qt has to be adapted to work with a new API, that should require some rework.
While at the same time AArch64 is "only" a new CPU architecture. If Qt is correctly cross-platform and also support ancestors and similar 64 bits architecture (it supports x86, x86_64, and ARM), there shouldn't be an extensive rewrite of the code. There should be some cpu-related quircks to fix, there should be perhaps a few very-low-level API calls that change, but most of the time, Qt is still calling the same Linux/X11/etc. stack.