14 DAY TRIAL // Krita developer Boudewijn Rempt reports on the work done by him and other devs that are part of the team responsible for porting the famous open-source and cross-platform digital painting software to the next-generation KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 technologies.
Therefore, the good news we want to share with you today is that the port of Krita to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 is almost done, with a few quirks here and there, but technically, they are done porting it. Of course, this means that the software source code compiles successfully and the binaries run without any hiccups. Best of all, it would appear that there are no more dependencies on deprecated classes or libraries anymore.
According to Mr. Rempt, it would appear that most of the plugins and libraries of the Calligra open-source office suite, under which the Krita software is being distributed to GNU/Linux operating systems, have also been ported to the Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 technologies, which, apparently, was not an easy process at all, and everything was possible only thanks to the generous people who sponsored the operation.
"Technically, we're done porting Krita to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. That is to say, everything builds, links and Krita runs, and there are no dependencies on deprecated libraries or classes anymore," says Boudewijn Rempt. "Krita wouldn't have died, but looking back at the previous month's work, I wonder I didn't go crazy, in a loud way. I spent four, five days a week on porting, and fixing the porting documentation, and then one or two days on trying to keep the bug count down for the 2.9 branch."
Krita 3.0 coming later this year
From the rest of Boudewijn Rempt's blog post, which is a recommended reading for hardcore geeks who want to find out all the juicy details about porting a software project to new technologies, we've learned that the port of Krita to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 still needs some final touches, as it appears that some things are not working properly and need to be fixed.
Once these issues are fixed, the Krita developers will need to generate new build environments for the Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X computer operating systems, do some cleanup, and start testing the port thoroughly. And finally, some time later this year we will be able to install the next-generation Krita 3.0 software on our computers and discover a new, magical world of digital painting.