source: trunk/CHANGES.OS2@ 780

This document contains a brief list of the most important OS/2-specific changes
in the Qt library from release to release.


CHANGES


4.6.2 (14-05-2010)

  Improvements:

  - general: Updated Qt codebase to version 4.6.2 (see the changes-4.6.2 file
    for details). Note that this version is binary incompatible with the
    previous version (see README.OS2 for more information).

  - general: Implemented support for the OS/2 platform in the webkit module. The
    webkit module is used in many complex web-based applications such as web
    browsers to implement the JavaScript support. Note that the script module
    uses the JavaScript implementation from the WebKit project too and it was
    also ported to OS/2. The webkit module is always present in the official Qt
    build but is disabled by defautl in the custom builds due to big compilation
    times.

  - general: Use declspec(dllexport) on OS/2 to significantly reduce the number
    of exports in generated DLLs. This mode is on by default which reduces the
    number of exported symbols by 90-100% in Qt DLLs and makes it not necessary
    to split the QtGui DLL in 3 parts in debug mode. The old method which causes
    all public symbols to be exported is still available using the "export_all"
    CONFIG option (see README.OS2 for details).

  - general: Provide the "doc" WPI archive that contains the Qt reference
    documentation.

  - corelib: Implemented native (XWP-based) file system watcher for OS/2 that
    does not eat CPU (which is best noticed in file dialogs showing directories
    containing hundreds of files. Requires XWorkplace to be installed.

  - corelib: Implemented deriving the defaut locale from the process country
    code if LANG is not set and integration with the system locale object
    (System Setup -> Country Palette). See the QT_PM_NO_SYSTEM_LOCALE
    description in README.OS2 for details.

  - gui: Implemented printing support through CUPS. Refer to section "PRINTING
    SUPPORT" in README.OS2 for details.

  - gui: Implemented painting in widgets using DIVE (direct interface video
    extensions). Using DIVE gives a significant graphical performance boost, up
    to 100% in BLIT mode and 130% in FBSWM mode, depending on the combination of
    the graphics hardware, video driver and the current screen mode. See the
    QT_PM_DIVE and QT_PM_NO_DIVE description in README.OS2 for more details.

  - gui: Improved the painting speed when not using DIVE. The performance boost
    varies from 30% to 200% (e.g. 3 times faster), depending on the combination
    of the graphics hardware, video driver and the current screen mode.

  - gui: Enabled MMX/SSE support (on by default) to speed up graphical
    operations by a couple of percents.

  - gui: Enabled accessibility support on OS/2. Note that in order to use the
    accessibility functions, a QAccessibleBridge plugin for the corresponding
    accessibility device is necessary but none of them exist at the present
    time.

  - gui: Use native file icons in standard Qt file dialogs.

  - assistant: Enabled the help module and made the Qt Assistant tool build on
    OS/2. Also enabled help and assistant examples and demos.

  - demos: Enabled the browser demo application that makes use of the webkit
    module.

  - demos: Enabled the qtdemo example that demonstrates all Qt features and
    acts as a launcher for other example and demo applications.

  - gnumake/os2-g++: Switch the compiler to using the i486 instruciton set for
    code generation. This gives around 3% of the performance boost when
    painting. As a drawback, the code will no longer run on i386 PCs but it is
    assumed that it does not make sense to use Qt4 on these computers.

  Fixes:

  - general: Fixed: Building Qt applications with the "dev" WPI archive would
    fail due to extra spaces in the output object file names.

  - corelib: Fixed: Regular files were treated as sequential streams which made
    the seek functionality unavailable. This in particular affected Qt Designer
    that didn't expect sequential streams when reading .ui files and refused to
    load files bigger than 8192 bytes as a result.

  - corelib: Make sure the hardware error popup dialogs do not appear when
    opening the standard Qt file dialog and selecting a removable drive with no
    media inserted even with AUTOFAIL=YES in CONFIG.SYS

  - corelib: QProcess: Fixed: Data could not be successfully read or written to
    the standard streams of the started process in 'highmem' link mode (which is
    on by default since 4.5.1 GA), as well as in normal link mode in some
    situations.

  - corelib: Fixed QProcess::startDetached() which would not work in 'highmem'
    mode.

  - corelib: QProcess: Fixed: Having stderr of a started child process
    redirected to a pipe (which is the default) would indirectly cause an
    impossibility to write anything to its stdin.

  - corelib: QProcess: Get rid of the unexpected "DosQueryNPipeSemState returned
    87" warning.

  - corelib: QFileSystemWatcher: In the fall-back polling watcher, increased the
    sleep time between checks of all watched files from 1 second to 3 seconds to
    decrease the CPU load on big sets of watched files. Also, replaced the sleep
    between checking individual items with the yield call as it doesn't give
    significant improvement but just causes more CPU cycles to be spent between
    each check.

  - corelib: Always return true from QFileInfo::isRoot()/isDir() for paths
    referring to root directories of drives with no media and always return
    false from QFileInfo::exists() for them. Also, don't lstat() on such paths
    since they are definitely not symlinks. This improves the file dialog
    appearance and behavior for removable drives.

  - corelib: Protect against the frozen system when QSocketNotifier is given an
    unsupported socket (for example, an OS/2 file handle). There is still 100%
    CPU load in this case, but the application can be at least closed using
    normal means.

  - corelib: Sockets: Fixed: "has data to read" socket notifications would be
    sometimes delivered with a delay depending on the frequency of timers which
    could significantly slow down network data transfer.

  - corelib: QTemporaryFile: Fixed: Files were opened in O_TEXT mode which
    caused unexpected LF <-> CRLF translation. In particular, this broke
    QNetworkDiskCache functionality (seen in e.g. demos/browser as missing
    images and CSS sheets when read from cache).

  - corelib: Fixed: Clear FPU CW in qdtoa() to avoid the floating point
    exception in various scenarios [patch by rudi].

  - gui: Fixed assertion in QVector::at() at startup.

  - gui: Fixed assertion at #1125 in qwidget.cpp (due to an attempt to
    re-instantiate QDesktopWidget during application termination).

  - gui: Select the correct icon for the drive letter in standard file dialogs
    depending on the drive type (floppy, hard disk etc) [patch by rudi].

  - gui: Fixed crash in PMMERGE during resize & move of the top level window
    with the complex layout (caused by reading outside the bitmap data).

  - gui: Fixed: Never add tooltip windows to the top-level window list and only
    do so for splash windows if they have the Qt::WindowTitleHint flag set.

  - 3rdparty: Added OS/2 support to clucene used by the help module for fulltext
    search in help files [based on the patch by rudi].

  - configure.cmd: Fixed: QT_BUILD_KEY (and QLibraryInfo::buildKey()) would
    always contain "release", even in debug builds, which caused debug builds to
    load the release plugins and refuse the debug ones.

  - qmake/os2-g++: Use -Wl, to pass the object list response file to the
    linker as is instead of the expanded list of objects (this overcomes the
    64KB limitation of the total process command line length in OS/2).


4.5.1 GA (05-02-2010)

  Improvements:

  - general: Switched the compiler to the GCC 4.4.2 build provided by Paul
    Smeldey. This gives better standard conformance, better code optimization
    and provides more compact DLLs and EXEs whose size is greater than ~1M.

  - corelib: QSettings: Use IniFormat (plain INI files) when NativeFormat is
    requested instead of the Open32 registry which is known to be unstable and
    can be easily corrupted. The old behavior may be restored using the
    QT_PM_REGISTRY environment variable.

  - corelib: Use UniStrcoll for QString::localeAwareCompare() for locale-aware
    comparison of NLS strings.

  - gui: Implemented full Direct Manipulation (Drag And Drop) support. This
    includes dragging text, URLs and files between PM and Qt applications,
    dragging any MIME data across Qt applications, setting custom drag pointer
    pixmaps, painting in widgets while dragging.

  - gui: Implemented session management with the QSessionManager class.

  - gui: Fully implemented the QDesktopServices class.

  - gui: Added support for numpad keys and for some common multimedia keys
    recognized by eCS (volume, home, search, favorites).

  - gui: QCursor: Added missing cursor shapes and implemented support for custom
    cursor shapes.

  - gui: Implemented QFontDatabase::addApplicationFont()/removeApplicationFont()
    and friends.

  - gui: Implemented proper generation of possible key and modifier combinations
    for a given key event. This in particular enables Ctrl+<letter> shortcuts
    for non-Latin languages and also makes Ctrl+<letter>, Alt+<letter> and
    similar shortcuts language-neutral.

  - gui: QWidget: When setting the parent, take the parent's resolve masks to
    make sure attributes imposed by the user on the parent won't be overriden
    byv the natural palette for this widget if it differs from
    QApplication::palette() [vendor bug].

  - gui: Use a normal border for top-level Tool widgets since the thin one is
    too thin and cannot be resized.

  - gui: Implemented delivering of QEvent::NonClientAreaMouse* events to
    top-level widgets. This enables undocked dock widgets to be docked back by
    a double click on the title bar and also by moving over the dock areas.

  - plugins: Enabled the sqlite3 plugin which makes the sql module (and
    applications depending on it) actually usable.

  - tools: Enabled the Qt Designer application.

  - tools: Enabled the following toos: pixeltool, q3toq4, xmplatterns.

  - qmake/os2-g++: Recognize the "map" option in the CONFIG variable that allows
    to turn the generation of .map files on and off. The option is set by
    default.

  - qmake/os2-g++: Recognize the "highmem" option in the CONFIG variable that
    allows to enabled memory support in LIBC for genereated DLLs and
    executables. The option is set by default.

  Fixes:

  - corelib: Created wrappers for all Win* and Gpi* calls that restore the FPU
    Control Word to what C/C++ programs expect. This fixes crashes in various
    Qt applications (e.g. mp3diags) due to SIGFPE.

  - corelib: QLibraryInfo: Fixed: qt.conf would not have been loaded if a
    component path was requested before QCoreApplication instance creation.

  - corelib: QLibraryInfo: Changed default "Settings" path to %ETC%/xdg.
    Also use %ETC%/qtsys.conf as the system-wide qt.conf instead of
    %ETC%/qt/qtsys.conf.

  - corelib: QFSFileEngine: Fixed: On OS/2, trailing spaces in file names are
    ignored ("readme " = "readme") but kLIBC doesn't handle this well so strip
    them before passing to LIBC APIs.

  - corelib: QFile::copy(): Use DosCopy() instead of read/write.

  - corelib: Fixed: QProcess::startDetached() would either crash or fail to
    start a process.

  - corelib: Fixed: QFileInfo::isExecutable() would return true for all files on
    local OS/2 file systems.

  - gui: Fixed: Popups shown when another application is active were not
    controllable with keyboard and didn't close on an outside mouse click.

  - gui: Fixed: Visible title bar and frame of the top-level window after
    switching to fullscreen.

  - gui: Fixed: Wrong widget-relative mouse position in mouse events. This fixes
    problems with dragging widget splitters (separators) in applications using
    dock widgets.

  - gui: Fixed: QEvent::Enter/Leave events were delivered incorrectly if the
    alien child widget belonging to a native parent intersected with a native
    child of this parent (this in particular caused extended tool bars to
    immediately un-extend once the mouse moves over the extended part).

  - gui: Fixed: Mouse press events replayed after closing the popup by clicking
    outside it had incorrect coordinates. This resulted into various kinds of
    misbehavior including spatial text selection in QTextEdit widgets after
    closing popups by clicking inside these widgets.

  - gui: Fixed: The default application icon embedded into the executable was
    not actually used as the default window icon for top-level widgets.

  - qmake/os2-g++: Do not use EXEPACK tool on static libraries.

  - qmake: Several fixes to make install targets work correctly.


Beta 5 (06-12-2009)

  Improvements:

  - gui: Added support for the system clipboard. Qt can now exchange plain text,
    HTML (Mozilla application suite) and bitmaps with other PM applications, as
    well as all supported MIME data types with other Qt-based applications.

  - corelib: Use system unicode conversion routines to convert from the system
    code page to Unicode and back. This makes it unnecessary to specify the
    system encoding in the LANG environment variable -- Qt will use the system
    encoding of the current process.

  - gui: Implemented support for the IME input box (used on DBCS systems) in Qt
    applications with a known limitation that the input box is always positioned
    at the lower left corner of the top-level window.

  - gui: Improved font handling on DBCS systems (patch by komh):
    * Read national face names from font files instead of always taking the
      Latin name.
    * Use the PM_AssociateFont registry key to select a fallback font for
      missing characters.

  - gui: Implemented QPixmap::grabWindow() which takes a screenshot of a window.

  - gui: Steal the Alt key from the PM which prevents the PM system menu to be
    shown when single Alt is pressed in a Qt application. The system menu may
    still be called using Alt+Space. Note that this also disables all default
    shortuts from the system menu (Alt+F7, Alt+F10 etc.) so that they available
    to Qt applications now. Exceptions are Alt+F4, Ctrl+Esc, Alt+Esc which are
    not passed to Qt and will function as in regular PM applciations.

  - general: Binary Qt library builds are made portable: they do not contain
    hard-coded paths to various Qt components any more and use relative
    locations whenever possible. See
    http://svn.netlabs.org/qt4/browser/tags/4.5.1-os2-beta5/doc/src/qt-conf.qdoc
    for more info.

  - corelib: Improved the polling QFileSystemWatcher implementation so that it
    doesn't eat all CPU when there are more than 100 items to watch, like when
    showing a file open dialog with many files in a directory.

  - qmake: Improved processing of the project library list (LIBS variable) to
    avoid appearance of raw library names that require substitution (fixes the
    debug build of linguist).

  - qmake: Added support for DEF_FILE_VERSION, DEF_FILE_DESCRIPTION and
    DEF_FILE_VENDOR project variables that allow to embed the description
    string into a generated DLL or executable. For compatibility with other
    platforms, these variables by default are mapped to VERSION,
    QMAKE_TARGET_PRODUCT + QMAKE_TARGET_DESCRIPTION + QMAKE_TARGET_COPYRIGHT and
    QMAKE_TARGET_COMPANY, respectively.

  Fixes:

  - gui: Table views showed alternate rows in black color instead of light gray.

  - gui: If some font style (e.g. Bold) does not provide characters for some
    script (e.g. Cyrillic) while the Normal style does, a different font will be
    chosen for Bold Cyrillic instead of drawing empty boxes.

  - corelib: Fixed two issues related to loading text codec plugins from the
    application's directory.

  - corelib: Fixed QDir::absoluteFilePath(), midir()/mkpath(), rmdir()/rmpath()
    that didn't properly handle relative and UNC paths which could cause various
    path-related failures.

  - corelib: Properly report root directories of drives to Qt. This makes
    letters of removable drives always seen by Qt (for example, in the file open
    dialog) even if the medium isn't currently inserted.

  - corelib: Fixed unnecessary access to removable drives and a long delay and
    noice caused by it when showing a file open dialog in Qt applications.


Beta 4 (11-11-2009)

  Improvements:

  - Added sound support (implemented QSound class).

  - Added system tray support (QSystemTrayIcon class). This support requires
    the Extended system tray XCenter plugin to be installed. See the note above
    on how to compile and install this plugin.

  - Enabled QPlugin support on OS/2. This in turn enables SVG support for
    QIcon (which is built as a Qt plugin DLL by default).

  - Better widget modality support (widgets blocked by modality cannot be
    activated and moved using the mouse and the title bar anymore).

  - Added support for 'console' and 'windows' CONFIG options in .pro files.
    Now, if 'windows' is present, the target executable will have the WINDOWAPI
    attribute set which effectively makes it a PM application. This, in
    particular, disables standard input, output and error streams so that when
    started, the application will not have a console window attached to it.
    By default, 'console' mode is active unless you perform a release build and
    the application is linked against the QtGui library ('QT = gui' in .pro),
    in which case the default is 'windows'.

  - Improved paint speed in Qt windows which should increase overall graphical
    UI performance by 10%-20% in Qt4 applications.

  - Implemented setting window icons for top-level windows (using
    QWidget::setWindowIcon()).

  - Added LxLite support to provide compression for executables and DLLs. The
    compression is controlled by the 'exepack' CONFIG option which is turned on
    by default for release builds if the LxLite executable is present in PATH
    during the configure.cmd invocation. The compression may be turned off on a
    per-project basis by adding a 'CONFIG -= exepack' line to the .pro file.

  - Improved the section of this README.OS2 file that describes how to properly
    set the LANG variable to have correct national characters in file names and
    in window titles of Qt applications.

  Fixes:

  - QProcess: The executable's path was not always added to BEGINLIBPATH.

  - Fixed-size top-level widgets could not be moved.

  - Application crash after pressing a button in a dialog window that resizes
    this dialog (for example, makes it bigger to show more information).

  - Resizing top level windows using the top border broke mouse coordinates so
    that Qt tought you pressed the mouse button in a different place of the
    window than where you actually did it.

  - Events posted with QCoreApplication::postEvent() were only processed upon
    receiving a next message from the system. This caused funny delays such as
    controls in a Qt window still indicating the input focus (the dotted
    rectangle) after the window was deactivated and losing this indication only
    when the mouse pointer was moved over the window.

  - Don't replay mouse button press on a push button that is showing a popup
    menu but instead hide the popup menu and unpress the button to get more
    native look and feel.

  - Deactivating the window with a push button showing a popup menu would hide
    the popup but leave the button pressed.

  - Fixed incorrect Qt dirty widget region calculation when processing WM_PAINT
    messages. This fixes a lot of redraw problems (menu items in the main menu
    bar, text in combo-boxes, various redraw problems in smplayer when switching
    interfaces and going to/from fullscreen, and similar).


Beta 3 (17-10-2009)

  Improvements:

  - Added proper font support. All outline (scalable) fonts visible in the Font
    Palette should be now recognized by Qt. The fonts are hinted and antialiased
    using the Freetype2 library when drawing text.

  - System fonts and colors are now used by default for Qt widgets.

  - configure.cmd now generates the main Makefile to simplify building of Qt.

  - corelib: QProcess: Implemented child termination detection.

  - corelib: QProcess: Implemented redirection to another QProcess.

  - corelib: QProcess now uses native pipes for stream redirection. This fixes
    various issues like 'Socket operation on non-socket' errors during
    parent-child communication.

  - corelib: QProcess: Make sure that the directory containing the executable
    file is always searched (first) for DLLs needed by this executable. This
    makes it unnecessary to change the current directory to the executable's
    directory or add it to LIBPATH before starting the Qt application.

  - corelib: QProcess can now start applications of different type (e.g. PM
    applications from text-mode applications) directly.
    QProcess::startDetached() also works.

  - qmake: In debug_and_release mode, 'release-(all|clean|distclean|install|
    uninstall)' and 'debug-(all|clean|distclean|install|uninstall)' make
    targets are now available.

  Fixes:

  - Doing 'make clean' could result into a hang due to CMD.EXE command line
    length limitation.

  - corelib: Fixed: QProcess: Lost data during stream redirection.

  - corelib: QSettings could sometimes distort data when saving it to the
    registry (by replacing some characters with codes 0x80 and above with '?').


Beta 2 (17-09-2009)

  Improvements:

  - Ported the network module (QtNetwork4.dll) and added to the default build.

  - Added modules sql, svg, xmlpatterns, scripttools, plugins to the default
    build.

  - gui: Added recognition of dead keys which makes it possible to type
    umlauts and other accented characters that require composition.

  - gui: Implemented standard cursor shapes in Qt applications.

  Fixes:

  - qmake: Fixed the trailing slash problem which caused qmake to generate
    incorrect makefiles and fail to build the Qt library on some platforms.

  - configure.cmd: Return to the root source tree directory after building
    qmake.

  - qmake: Automatically use different link flags when linking qmake with WLINK.

  - qmake: Recognize TARGET_SHORT that allows to specify a short DLL name
    (vital for OS/2 which reqires DLL names to be in 8x3 format).

  - build: Set short DLL names for Qt modules on OS/2 using TARGET_SHORT.

  - corelib: Various fixes to file system classes that deal with the file name
    case (which should be ignored on OS/2) and forward and back slashes.

  - corelib: Fixed: QMutex could let more than one thread access the protected
    resource.

  - corelib: Standard stream redirection in QProcess should now work for
    kLIBC-based child processes. Redirection for all other applications
    (such as CMD.EXE) will be added later (seems to be a kLIBC bug/feature).

  - gui: Fixed erroneous QFileDialog behavior (duplicate entires in the list,
    incomplete contents of the root directory of the current drive).

  - gui: Fixed: Ctrl+A..Z should generate characters with codes 0x01-0x1F.

  - gui: Fixed: Close popups when resizing/moving the top level window.

  - gui: Enabled actual enforcing min/max Qt widget constraints for top-level windows.

  - gui: Fixed child widget duplication when resizing top level widgets after
    showing a popup; moving native child widgets should now work correctly.
    This also fixed a number of redraw problems (for example, drawing the main
    menu and tool bars in smplayer, moving tool bars around in other
    applications such as textedit from the demo folder).


Beta 1 (29-08-2009)

  - First public release.