Announcing first Inqlude alpha release

Three years ago, at Randa 2011, the idea and first implementation of Inqlude, the Qt library archive, was born. So I'm particularly happy today to announce the first alpha release of the Inqlude tool, live from Randa 2014.

Picture by Bruno Friedmann

I use the tool for creating the web site since quite a while and it works nicely for that. It also can create and check manifest files, which is handy when you are creating or updating these for publication on the web site.

The handling of download and installation of packages of libraries listed on Inqlude is not ready yet. There is some basic implementation, but the meta data needed for it, is not there yet. This is something for a future release.

I put down the plan for the future into a roadmap. This release 0.7 is the first alpha. The second alpha 0.8 will mostly come with some more documentation about how to contribute. Then there will be a beta 0.9, which marks the point where we will keep the schema for the manifest stable. Release 1.0 will then be the point where the Inqlude tool will come with support for managing local packages, so that it's useful for developers writing Qt applications as end users. This plan is not set in stone, but it should provide a good starting point. Longer term I intend to have frequent releases to address the needs reported by users.

You will here more in my lightning talk Everything Qt at Akademy.

Inqlude is one part of the story to make the libraries created by the KDE community more accessible to Qt developers. With the recent first stable release of Frameworks 5, we have made a huge step towards that goal, and we just released the first update. A lot of porting of applications is going on here at the meeting, and we are having discussion about various other aspects how to get there, such as a KDE SDK, how to address 3rd party developers, documentation of frameworks, and more. This will continue to be an interesting ride.