I’m going to get rid of Quassel in the next days unless something drastically changes, but since I really think that Sput was doing a hell of a good job, I’d like to point out what the problems are in my opinion.
There’s nothing wrong with the idea (I love it) nor with the UI (it’s not bad at all); having it be cross-platform also helps a lot. What I really feel is a problem, though, is the creeping in of dependencies in it. Which is not Sput’s fault for the most part, but it is a good example of why I think Qt and KDE development is getting farther and farther from what I liked about it in the past.
With KDE, the last straw was when I’ve noticed that to install Umbrello I had to install Akonadi, which in turn required me to install MySQL. I don’t use MySQL for myself, I used for a couple of web development jobs but I’d really like for it to stay stopped since I don’t need it on a daily basis. On the other hand I have a running PostgreSQL I use for my actual work, like the symbol collision analysis. I doubt that it would have required me to start MySQL or Akonadi to run Umbrello, but the problem was with the build system. Just like KDE guys bastardised autotools in what is one of the most overcomplex build systems that man was able to create in the KDE 3 series, they have made CMake even worse than it would be as released by Kitware (which, on the other hand, somehow seemed to make it a bit less obnoxious — not that I like it any better, but if one has the major need of building under Windows, it can be dealt with better than some custom build systems I’ve seen).
So the new KDE4 build system seems to pick up the concept of shared checks from KDE3, which basically turns down to be a huge amount of checks that are unneeded for most software but will be executed by all of it, just because trying to actually split the “modules” in per-application releases, like GNOME does already, is just too difficult for SuSE, sorry, KDE developers.
This time the dependency creep hit Quassel badly. The recent releases of Quassel added a dependency over qt-webkit to show a preview of a link when posted in IRC. While I think this is a bad idea (because, for instance, if there was a security issue in qt-webkit, it would be tremendously easy to get users to load the page), and it still has implementation issues when the link points to a big binary file rather than a webpage or an image, it can be considered an useful feature so I never complained about it.
Today after setting up the new disks the update proposed by portage contained an interesting request of installing qt-phonon. Which I don’t intend to install at all! The whole idea of having to install phonon for an application like Quassel is just out of my range of acceptable doings.
I was the first one to complain that GNOME required/requires GStreamer, but thanks to Lennart’s efforts we now have an easy way to play system sound without needing GStreamer, on the other hand, KDE is still sticking with huge amount of layers and complex engines to do the easiest of the tasks. I’m not saying that the ideas behind Solid and the like are entirely wrong, but it does feel wrong for them to be KDE-only, just like it feels wrong for other technologies to be GNOME-only. Lennart’s libcanberra shows that there is space for desktop-agnostic technologies implementing the basic features needed by all of them, it just requires work and coordination.
So now I’m starting up Quassel to check on my messages and then I’ll log it out, after installing X-Chat or something.