People Behind KDE: Jaroslaw Staniek

On tonight's People Behind KDE we present a coder who has been the driving force behind not only the premier free software database client, Kexi, but also single handedly ported kdelibs to win32. Find out how he achieved such feats of development heights while still breeding a herd of crickets for his chameleon in our interview with Jaroslaw Staniek.

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Comments

by Louis (not verified)

Does he deep-fry those crickets before feeding them to his chameleon? ;-)

by Jaroslaw Staniek (not verified)

Of course not, it's usually important that the "meal" is in motion. Example movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr5_6PbLkdE&NR

by Louis (not verified)

Jaroslaw, I was just kidding about the misspelling:

bread - v. to cover with crumbs, as in cooking preparation.
breed - v. to produce offspring.

I used to own a lizard also, so I know all about their feeding habits. :-) I was just having a bit of a laugh.

by Jaroslaw Staniek (not verified)

haha, OK, already fixed :)

by S Page (not verified)

Mr. Staniek says "Under windows 2000 I heavily use and depend on the Cygwin bash shell".

Me too, so I tried qt-win-opensource-src-4.2, but I couldn't get it to work under Cygwin; qmake wouldn't build. "qt4 does not support cygwin yet and requires some patches." http://lists.trolltech.com/qt-interest/2005-08/thread00444-0.html

There is a Qt version for mingw, I'll try that next.

KDE on Mac and KDE on Windows are very important projects to get people to Qt on a FOSS O.S.

by Eric Laffoon (not verified)

I'm happily not involved in Windows coding, but I'm familiar with the projects. First of all it is not Qt not supporting Cygwin, it is the other way around. Cygwin typically lags behind the latest KDE releases. Beyond that I'm not sure if it ever will because the Qt4 windows package you are citing is a native GPL windows package. Cygwin provides X on Windows. Qt4 for windows is native AFAIK so that would mean no Cygwin. What Jaroslaw has been working on is KDE3 on Windows ported from Linux to Windows. KDE 4 will start off with a native windows GPL Qt.

This is similar to the Mac story where Fink (IIRC) was the library to run an X server on OS X and then a native GPL version of Qt was released. So if you're concerned about Qt/KDE on Mac and Windows introducing our software to people I'd say a lot more of them are going to be exposed if they don't have to set up an X server to run the software.

by S Page (not verified)

Yeah, I know Cygwin offers an X11 server (XOrg 6.8.99) on Windows, I'm not talking about that. I just wanted to build the Qt for Windows *source* code using the build tools that I've already installed under Cygwin (g++, GNU make, etc. in the Cygwin UNIX-like environment) rather than the MinGW tools (g++, mingw32-make, etc. in a DOS-like environment) Even though the commands are similar, I realize it's non-trivial to support both, e.g. configure output has
Build is done in............C:\cygwin\home\spage\qt-win-opensource-src-4.2.0
Install prefix............../home/spage/qt-copy
Headers installed to........\home\spage\qt-copy\include
Darn Windows path separators and drive letters! :-)

(I occasionally ran ranger rick's fine KDE 3/Fink work on a company Mac laptop.)

by Jaroslaw Staniek (not verified)

By mentioning "Cygwin" I mean "running Cygwin bash shell for convenience", not linking against cygwin libs or running X11 apps. And yes, I talked about KDE3 development. I wish we could use Cygwin bash with Qt4 as well.

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

who wants to start a "Happy Birthday" thread.

Thank you _all_ KDE developers and contributors for ten amazing years.
One of the best of KDE is it comunity. So, this is also the right time to celebrate ourself :-)

Bye

Thorsten (user since a 0.x beta of KDE) :-)

Right. Happy Birthday KDE, and long live thy dragon!

User since 3.0