On 26/03/2014 19:46, Joe Taylor wrote:
Hi Joe,
Maybe someone here knows the answer to something that has been bugging
me.
I'm thinking about the way WSJT-X (and others of our programs) will be
packaged for end users -- in particular, for Windows.
One of the required support files, icudt51.dll, is some 22 MB -- more
than three times larger than any of the others. Is there a way that
we can extract and use what we need from this library, without using
the whole thing? If so, would doing that be consistent with the
relevant license?
The library contains large static tables of data related to character
sets for many locales, it is quite big. There is a customization tool
that allows removal of languages. Since we are one step removed from ICU
(it is a library that Qt itself uses for i18n services) I'm not sure if
we can substitute a tailored ICU library is a shipped product. There are
no licence issues but there may be a technical issue. Worst case short
of impossible would be that we would have to do a build of Qt from
source on platforms where we package the Qt and support libraries.
The Qt team are discussing options but it is a very complex issue for
them. For the gory details see here:
https://qt-project.org/groups/qt-contributors-summit-2013/wiki/Qt_ICU .
There is an option to build Qt without ICU, it is only an absolute
requirement for QtWebKit but then translations and more would be
unavailable.
Another way of handling this would be to have a one-time download of
support files, and a separate, much smaller, download of the stuff
that typically gets changed with our version upgrades. With the
present WSJT-X this makes for a basic support file of 13.5 MB and a
WSJT-X_v1.4 file of 2.5 MB. Would this be a good way to package
things, in the future? Or is the hassle more trouble than it's worth,
with today's disk sizes and internet speeds?
I tend to lean towards not worrying, the ICU capabilities will be very
valuable when we start providing translations for the wsjtx UI. Also
detaching the support libraries from the product is a complication of
some scale on Mac where we also package Qt and its support libraries.
In a better world (Linux for example) the libraries we use are already
separately sourced.
I know there are users out there with slow data connections, expensive
satellite links etc. in remote locations and appreciate their pain when
a multi-megabyte install is offered for a single application, but it's
not really us that are causing that, it's the choices of the Qt team and
I think will be pushing uphill if we want to tweak their standard package.
Of course the Qt team look at it as a relatively small (less than 50%)
part of their overall install, whereas for us at present where we only
use a small part of the Qt capabilities it does seem an over large
component.
-- Joe, K1JT
73
Bill
G4WJS.
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