Debian removal of Qt4 in Bullseye and beyond

Discussion about building and installing Elmer
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Gary R
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Debian removal of Qt4 in Bullseye and beyond

Post by Gary R »

Hi all,
OS Debian Bullseye (testing) with some Sid (unstable) packages installed.
KDE desktop
AMD-64 system - 4processors
16 GB ram

I have been trying to build elmer using the CmakeGUI and have been having configure errors. I traced this back to Elmer still using Qt4 in a lot of places. Please refer to:

Code: Select all

Debian Bug report logs - #939626
where Qt4 is being eliminated in future releases. This needs to be fixed - and soon.

Gary R.
kevinarden
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Re: Debian removal of Qt4 in Bullseye and beyond

Post by kevinarden »

It would be reasonable to demand that Debian and Ubuntu continue to support Qt4, but they are not. It will take a while and significant effort for other packages to upgrade code from Qt4. It will not be "fixed" soon.
KaiMartin
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Re: Debian removal of Qt4 in Bullseye and beyond

Post by KaiMartin »

Gary R wrote: 30 May 2020, 21:35 I have been trying to build elmer using the CmakeGUI and have been having configure errors. I traced this back to Elmer still using Qt4 in a lot of places.
Hi Kevin.
Back in April I managed to compile most of the elmer suite on a machine that runs bullseye, that is, without QT4. I summarized the results in this thread: http://elmerfem.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7037

Apparently, most of Elmer is already converted to QT5. The only cmake option that did not compile due to missing QT4 libraries was PYTHONQT - not sure what this is needed for. I was able to play with some of the simulations in the tutorials.
---<)kaimartin(>---
Gary R
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Re: Debian removal of Qt4 in Bullseye and beyond

Post by Gary R »

Re: kevinarden's remark about Debian continuing to furnish QT4. There was a detailed letter from the Debian maintainers that I read some months ago that outlined why they won't do that. The bottom line is that Qt4 is no longer being maintained up stream and it is getting very hard to update packaging. The problem starts with the Qt4 maintainers.

The problem seems to reside with ElmerGUI primarily. There is a Qt5 compatible copy of the GUI in the linux mint .ova distribution but that version will only work on VirtualBox (which I dislike for various reasons). Who ever rewrote the package included a new feature that allows the loading or archiving solvers without digging around in the computer files. Nice touch,


Yours,
Gary R.
ceanwang
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Re: Debian removal of Qt4 in Bullseye and beyond

Post by ceanwang »

KaiMartin wrote: 08 Sep 2020, 03:09 Apparently, most of Elmer is already converted to QT5. The only cmake option that did not compile due to missing QT4 libraries was PYTHONQT - not sure what this is needed for. I was able to play with some of the simulations in the tutorials.
There is one PYTHONQT folder under ElmerGUI.
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