TheQtCompany has announced a series of changes in their Qt offering which sound a lot like some previously reverted changes, just worse.

I'm going to state my opinion as well, of course. There have been several messages with criticism both in the Qt developers' mailing list as well as in various blogs (including some hosted in Planet KDE), and among this loud, predictable chorus of complaints there are a few messages that, in my opinion, shine for clarity and insightfulness. One is the blog post from Boudewijn Rempt, one of the main developers of the highly successful Krita application. Then, speaking about the issue of Qt LTS releases, Giuseppe d'Angelo posed a few still unanswered questions in the mailing list. The most frightening reply of all is Nikolai Marchenko's message about TheQtCompany's presumed business model, to which I cannot really find any strong counter-arguments.

What is left to me to say? Well, the first thing I'd like to say is that, as a Qt contributor with a history of several upstream contributions many of which developed in my own free time, this sounds like a big middle finger pointed at me. Or like saying that my effort is not worth the access to a LTS or to a password-free download of binary releases. This is not really encouraging contributions from the community.

The main point, though, is that TheQtCompany is effectively making it hard for developers to start using it and to consider it as a true open source project. Especially other open source projects, like UBports (which is based on Qt LTS releases) are going to feel the pain. It's going to alienate Qt advocates, and at the end reducing the user base.

And the funny thing, and the point that in my opinion TheQtCompany has not pondered well enough, is that Qt is still open source, so this move is actually going to benefit their competitors: suppose that an imaginary company NOKLA (but it could be a very real company, one of those who make a business selling Qt consultancy) sets up open download repositories and offers even minimally maintained LTS branches at qt.nokla.com. What will happen is that the name NOKLA will eventually be associated with "the place where you can download Qt", or "where you can find a well-maintained LTS for Qt", effectively boosting the NOKLA brand and implicitly enshrining them as the company to talk to in order to get your Qt-related business done.

I'm quite sure that TheQtCompany will end up reverting this decision, at least for the most part. My guess is that it's the fruit of the mind of some newly hired manager who understands very little of open source, business or marketing and who has been given a little too much decision power. Time will tell.

A short announcement, probably meaningless to most people, but who knows: I've created an Ubuntu PPA with the latest QBS. The reason why this might make some sense is that this PPA targets the older Ubuntu distributions. It's currently built for 14.04 (Trusty, which is no longer supported by Canonical), and I'll eventually upload the QBS package for 16.04, too.

This package can be useful to people distributing applications in the AppImage format, where one usually builds the application in one older distribution in order to increase the chances of it being runnable in as many Linux distributions as possible. A simpler way to obtain QBS on Trusty is to install QtCreator, but that's not trivial to install in an automated way and might not come with the latest QBS. Especially when building on Ubuntu, a package from a PPA is much easier to install.

This QBS is built statically, and won't install any Qt libraries on your system; this is good, because it allows you to use whatever Qt version you like without any risk of conflicts.

I just released PhotoTeleport 0.12, which includes the feature mentioned in the title of this blog post. Given that it took me some time to understand how this could work with Qt, I think it might be worth spending a couple of lines about how to implement it.

In the target application

The first step (and the easiest one) is about adding the proper information to your .plist file: this is needed to tell MacOS what file types are supported by your application. The official documentation is here, but given that an example is better than a thousand words, here's what I had to add to PhotoTeleport.plist in order to have it registered as a handler for TIFF files:

  <key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
  <array>
    <dict>
      <key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
      <array>
        <string>tiff</string>
        <string>TIFF</string>
        <string>tif</string>
        <string>TIF</string>
      </array>
      <key>CFBundleTypeMIMETypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>image/tiff</string>
      </array>
      <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
      <string>NSTIFFPboardType</string>
      <key>CFBundleTypeOSTypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>TIFF</string>
        <string>****</string>
      </array>
      <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
      <string>Viewer</string>
      <key>LSHandlerRank</key>
      <string>Default</string>
      <key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
      <array>
        <string>public.tiff</string>
      </array>
      <key>NSDocumentClass</key>
      <string>PVDocument</string>
    </dict>
    …more dict entries for other supported file formats…
  </array>

This is enough to have your application appear in Finder's "Open with…" menu and be started when the user selects it from the context menu, but it's only half of the story: to my big surprise, the selected files are not passed to your application as command line parameters, but via some MacOS-specific event which needs to be handled.

By grepping into the Qt source code, I've found out that Qt already handles the event, which is then transformed into a QFileOpenEvent. The documentation here is quite helpful, so I won't waste your time to repeat it here; what has hard for me was to actually find that this functionality exists and is supported by Qt.

In the source application

The above is only half of the story: what if you are writing an application which wants to send some files to some other application? Because of the sandboxing, you cannot just start the desired application in a QProcess and pass the files as parameters: again, we need to use the Apple Launch Services so that the target application would receive the files through the mechanism described above.

Unfortunately, as far as I could find this is not something that Qt supports; sure, with QDesktopServices::openUrlExternally() you can start the default handler for the given url, but what if you need to open more than one file at once? And what if you want to open the files in a specific application, and not just in the default one? Well, you need to get your hands dirty and use some MacOS APIs:

#import <CoreFoundation/CoreFoundation.h>
#import <ApplicationServices/ApplicationServices.h>

void MacOS::runApp(const QString &app, const QList<QUrl> &files)
{
    CFURLRef appUrl = QUrl::fromLocalFile(app).toCFURL();

    CFMutableArrayRef cfaFiles =
        CFArrayCreateMutable(kCFAllocatorDefault,
                             files.count(),
                             &kCFTypeArrayCallBacks);
    for (const QUrl &url: files) {
        CFURLRef u = url.toCFURL();
        CFArrayAppendValue(cfaFiles, u);
        CFRelease(u);
    }

    LSLaunchURLSpec inspec;
    inspec.appURL = appUrl;
    inspec.itemURLs = cfaFiles;
    inspec.asyncRefCon = NULL;
    inspec.launchFlags = kLSLaunchDefaults + kLSLaunchAndDisplayErrors;
    inspec.passThruParams = NULL;

    OSStatus ret;
    ret = LSOpenFromURLSpec(&inspec, NULL);
    CFRelease(appUrl);
}

In Imaginario I've saved this into a macos.mm file, added it to the source files, and also added the native MacOS libraries to the build (qmake):

LIBS += -framework CoreServices

You can see the commit implementing all this, it really doesn't get more complex than this. The first parameter to the MacOS::runApp() function is the name of the application; I've verified that the form /Applications/YourAppName.app works, but it may be that more human-friendly variants work as well.

Recently I've grown an interest to the indieweb: as big corporations are trying to dictate the way we live our digital life, I'm feeling the need to take a break from at least some of them and getting somehow more control over the technologies I use.

Some projects have been born which are very helpful with that (one above all: NextCloud), but there are also many older technologies which enable us to live the internet as a free distributed network with no owners: I'm referring here to protocols such as HTTP, IMAP, RSS, which I perceive to be under threat of being pushed aside in favor of newer, more convenient, but also more oppressive solutions.

Anyway. The indieweb community is promoting the empowerment of users, by teaching them how to regain control of their online presence: this pivots arund having one's own domain and use self-hosted or federated solutions as much as possible.

One of the lesser known technologies (yet widely used in the indieweb community) is webmentions: in simple terms, it's a way to reply to other people's blog posts by writing a reply in your own blog, and have it shown also on the original article you are replying to. The protocol behind this feature is an recommendation approved by the W3C, and it's actually one of the simplest protocol to implement. So, why not give it a try?

I already added support for comments in my blog (statically generated with Nikola) by deploying Isso, a self-hosted commenting system which can even run as a FastCGI application (hence, it can be deployed in a shared hosting with no support for long-running processes) — so I was looking for a solution to somehow convert webmentions into comments, in order hot to have to deal with two different commenting systems.

As expected, there was no ready solution for this; so I sat down and hacked up Bussator, a WSGI application which implements a webmention receiver and publishes the reply posts as Isso comments. The project is extensible, and Isso is only one of the possible commenting systems; sure, at the moment it's indeed the only one available, but there's no reason why a plugin for Static Man, Commento, Remark or others couldn't be written. I'll happily accept merge requests, don't be shy — or I can write it myself, if you convince me to (a nice Lego box would make me do anything 😉).

The first user of Bussator is this blog, and while the project code is well covered by unit tests, we all know that real life is all another matter; so please bear with me, if not everything works as it should. And that's why I'll be thrilled to see your webmentions replies here.

Ah, and webmentions will allow me to get your Twitter likes and replies published as comments, too — this thanks to Brid.gy!

We live in strange times. People are so filled with hatred and prejudices that their brain becomes unable to parse the simplest sentences. I take this issue to heart, because it could happen to anyone — it has happened to me before (luckily, only in private online conversations), where an acquaintance of mine accused me of saying things I never said. And it happens to famous people all the time. Guys, just because you hate person X, you should not skip over parts of their speech or suppress context in order to make it look like they said something terrible or stupid, when they didn't.

Now it happend to Richard Stallman, with a whole wave of hateful people accusing him of saying something that he didn't say. Let's start with the VICE article, titled "Famed Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As 'Entirely Willing'", which insists in quoting only two words out of Stallman's sentence:

Early in the thread, Stallman insists that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims were “entirely willing” while being trafficked.

Except that he didn't say that. Why not quote the whole sentence? It's not such a long sentence, really! Just follow the link to the source, which provides a complete excerpt of Stallman's words:

We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

Now, English is not my native language, but I read it well enough to understand that “to present oneself as” and “to be” are different expressions having very different meanings (and, in most context, actually opposite ones!). You don't need to be Shakespeare to understand that. You only need to either stop hating or, if you really cannot help it, at least stop projecting your prejudices onto the people you hate. Hate makes you blind.

It's sad to see otherwise intelligent people take stupid decisions because of such misunderstandings.

I for one, stand in solidarity with Richard Stallman and with the English language.

(please note that this is not an endorsement of everything Stallman might have said in the past; I don't follow him that closely, and it may be that he also happened to say terrible things in this very thread. I'm only commenting this very specific issue, and I know that in this very specific issue he's being wrongly accused)