Using private Qt API breaks compilation

[Wulf C. Krueger]

The commit "Fix text rendering by using private Qt APIs" introduces a build dependency on private Qt headers (especially: private/qtextengine_p.h). These shouldn't be used by anyone but Qt itself; they're private, can change any time and, worst of all, private headers usually do not get installed.

The issue results in this:

####### Building extension qt_hack #######
g++ -c -pipe -O2 -Wall -W -D_REENTRANT -fPIC -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_SHARED -I/usr/share/qt4/
mkspecs/linux-g++ -I. -I/usr/include/qt4/QtCore -I/usr/include/qt4/QtGui -I/usr/include/qt4 -I../../../../src/calib
re/ebooks/pdf/render -I../../../../src/qt-harfbuzz/src -I. -o qt_hack.o ../../../../src/calibre/ebooks/pdf/render/q
t_hack.cpp
../../../../src/calibre/ebooks/pdf/render/qt_hack.cpp:12:35: fatal error: private/qtextengine_p.h: No such file or
directory
compilation terminated.
make: *** [qt_hack.o] Error 1
Error while executing: make -f Makefile

Please find a better solution that does not involve using private APIs.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

There is no better solution. Complain to Qt, or install the private Qt
headers, on my linux distro (Gentoo) they are installed by default.

 status wontfix

[Rhialto (rhialto-xs4all)]

Well, this basically makes the distributed source useless.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

What nonsense. You can compile the source by installing the private Qt headers and you can run calibre from source, without even needing to compile it.

[Rhialto (rhialto-xs4all)]

Edit: I'm trying to package the latest version of Calibre for pkgsrc (http://www.pkgsrc.org :pkgsrc is a framework for building third-party software on NetBSD and other UNIX-like systems, currently containing over 12000 packages. ).

The current version is 0.9.39 at this time. It looks like pkgsrc won't distribute versions higher than 0.9.11 until this bug is fixed.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Then you have two choices:

1) Ask Digia to make the API needed by calibre public
2) Ask the maintainers of pkgsrc to allow building packages that use private Qt headers

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

And since calibre uses Qt 4.8 which is now in maintenance mode, (1) is unlikely.

[Rhialto (rhialto-xs4all)]

I have initiated a discussion on (2); see http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2013/07/13/msg011707.html .

[Domen Kožar (ielectric+)]

This is very annoying, since we don't ship private headers in Nix. It means we are stuck in 0.8.x series. Could calibre ship the private headers as intermediate solution?

[Lameventanas (lameventanas)]

This kind of things is the reason why most Linux distributions don't have a port of calibre.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Unfortunately, every major linux distribution has a port of calibre. And
I have to waste endless amounts of time telling people not to use the
distribution provided ports of calibre.