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Qt demands buying commercial license for commercial applications:
Yes, but the discussion is about Debian Packaging, anything that goes into Debian is definitely not encumbered by a commercial restrictions. Debian does more, IMHO than any other operation to ensure they don't step over any licensing line. For example, you could use the QT5 version of the IDE to make commercial GTK2 applications (no, I don't know why you would want to, but you could)
This is a no go to me.
Possibly (but read avra's writing) but not for a good proportion of Debian users. My point was that if you are writing a new app now and want it in the Debian Repository, it needs to be a QT app, not GTK2 one. While that will change as GTK3 matures, it where we are now.
About Enlightenment and Moksha: old personal habits die hard...
Yeah ! I sure agree. I use a Mate desktop because its like the desktop I used 20 years ago ! And I love it !
About Debian packages, we can work on building Lazarus using both Qt and GTK.
I believe that GTK3 support will be ready before we finish our job on refactoring Lazarus packages on Debian.
Thats an interesting statement. Are you saying we are close to completing GTK3 or are you saying we are a very long way from refactoring Lazarus Debian packages ? (thats a joke by the way).
On the topic of refactoring Lazarus, perhaps a useful question to ask is "does anyone find the Debian approach preferable" ? That particularly applies to the model of presenting Lazarus as six or eight packages, the IDE, GTK2LCL, GTK3LCL, QT5LCL etc ? In practice, in my personal experience, that does not help in any way. I have never found a situation where I wanted just one or two of those packages. (But I did stop using Debian packages quite early in my "Lazarus career".) If we could speak on behalf of a significant proportion of Linux Lazarus users who all say "keep it together man!" maybe we could make some progress ?
Davo