New and improved Inqlude web site

During last year's Summer of Code I had the honor of mentoring Nanduni Indeewaree Nimalsiri. She worked on Inqlude, the comprehensive archive of third party Qt libraries, improving the tooling to create a better structured web site with additional features such as categorization by topic. She did an excellent job with it and all of her code ended up on the master branch. But we hadn't yet made the switch to change the default layout of the web site to fully take advantage of all her work. As part of SUSE's 15th Hack Week, which is taking place this week, I took some time to change that, put up some finishing touches, and switch the Inqlude web site to the new layout. So here we are. I proudly present the new improved home page of Inqlude.

All libraries have additional meta data now to group them by a number of curated topics. You can see the topics in the navigation bar on the left and use them to navigate Inqlude by categories. The listing shows more information on first view, such as the supported platforms, to make it easier to find libraries according to your criteria without having to navigate between different pages. The presentation in general is cleaner now, and some usability testing has shown that the page works better now than before. In addition to the visible changes, Nanduni has also done quite a bit of improvements under the hood, including better automated testing. I'm proud of what we have achieved there.

It always has been a privilege for me to act as mentor as part of Google's Summer of Code or other programs. This is one of the most rewarding parts of working in free software communities, to see how new people learn and grow, especially if they decide to stay involved after the program has ended and become valuable members of the community for the long term. Being able to help with that I feel is one of the most satisfying investments of your time in the community.

184 Qt Libraries

We have collected 184 third party Qt libraries on Inqlude now. This is a pretty complete map of the Qt ecosystem, quite an impressive number, and lots of useful libraries extending Qt for many purposes.

Inqlude is based on a collection of manifests. If you like to add or update a library, simply submit a pull request there. The inqlude tool is used to manage the manifests, it generates the web site, but you can also use it to validate manifests, or download libraries. There also is inqlude-client, which is a C++ client for retrieving sources of libraries via the data on the Inqlude web site. It's pretty handy, if you want to integrate some library into your project.

If you want to get a brief introduction into Inqlude, you might want to watch my award winning lightning talk from Qt Dev Days 2013: "News from Inqlude, the Qt library archive". It still provides a pretty accurate explanation of what Inqlude is about and how it works.

A big part of the libraries which are collected on Inqlude are coming from KDE as part of KDE Frameworks. We just released KDE Frameworks 5.14. It's 60 Qt addon libraries which represent the state of the art of Linux desktop development and more.

Inqlude as well as KDE Frameworks are a community effort. Incidentally they both started at a developer sprint at Randa. Getting community people together for intense hacking and discussions is a tremendously powerful catalyst in the free software world. Randa exemplifies how this is done. The initial ideas for Inqlude were created there and last year it enabled me to release the first alpha version of Inqlude. These events are important for the free software world. You can help to make them happen by donating. Do this now. It's very much appreciated.

One more recent change was the addition of a manifest for all libraries part of the Inqlude archive. This is a JSON file aggregating all latest individual manifests. It makes it very easy for tools who don't need to deal with the history of releases to get everything in one go. The inqlude client uses it, and it's a straight-forward choice for integration with other tools which would like to benefit from the data available through Inqlude.

At the last Qt contributors summit we had some very good discussions about more integration. Integration with the Qt installer would allow to get third party library the same way you get Qt itself, or integration with Qt Creator would allow to find and use third party libraries for specific purposes natively in the environment you use to develop your application. One topic which came up was a classification of libraries to provide some information about stability, active development, and support. We will need to look into that, if there are some automatic indications we can offer for activity, or what else we can do to help people to find suitable libraries for their projects.

It's quite intriguing to follow what is going on in the Qt world. As an application developer there is a lot of good stuff to choose from. Inqlude intends to help with that. The web site is there and will continue to be updated and there also are a number of ideas and plans how to improve Inqlude to serve this purpose. Stay tuned. Or get involved. You are very welcome.

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.

One place to collect all Qt-based libraries

A few weeks ago, during SUSE Hack Week 10 and the Berlin Qt Dev Days 2013, I started to look for Qt-based libraries, set myself the goal of creating one place to collect all Qt-based libraries, and made some good progress. We had come up with this idea when a couple of KDE people came together in the Swiss mountains for some intensive hacking, and where the idea of Inqlude, the Qt library archive was born. We were thinking of something like CPAN for Qt back then. Since then there was a little bit of progress here and there, but my goal for the Hack Week was to complete the data to cover all relevant Qt-based libraries out there.

The mission is accomplished so far. Thanks to the help of lots of people who contributed pointers, meta data, feedback, and help, we have a pretty comprehensive list of Qt libraries now. Some nuts and bolts are still missing in the infrastructure, which are required to put everything on the web site, and I'm sure we'll discover some hidden gems of Qt libraries later, but what is there is useful and up to date. If some pieces are not yet, contributions are more than welcome.

Many thanks as well to the people at the Qt Dev Days, who gave me the opportunity to present the project to the awesome audience of the Qt user and developer community.

Format

The first key component of the project is the format for describing a Qt-based library. It's a JSON format, which is quite straightforward. That makes it easy to be handled programmatically by tools and other software, but is also still quite friendly to the human eye and a text editor.

The schema describes the meta data of a library and its releases, like name, description, release date and version, links to documentation and packages, etc. The data for Inqlude is centrally collected in a git repository using this schema, and the tools and the web site make use of it to provide nice and easy access to users.

Tools

The second key component is the tooling around the format. The big advantage of having a structured format to describe the data is that it makes it easy to write tools to deal with the data. We have a command line client, which currently is mostly used to validate and process the data, for example for generation of the web site, but is also meant to help users with installing and downloading libraries. It's not meant to replace a native package manager, but integrate with whatever your platform provides. This area needs some more work, though.

In the future it would be nice to have some more tools. I would like to see a graphical client for managing libraries, and integration with IDEs, such as Qt Creator or KDevelop would also be awesome.

Web site

The third key component is the web site. This is the central place for users to find and browse libraries, to read about details, and to have all links to what you need to use them in one place.

The web site currently is a simple static site with all its HTML and CSS generated from the meta data by the inqlude command line tool. Contributing data is still quite easy by providing patches to the data in the git repository. With GitHub's web interface you can even do that just using your web browser.

Notes

There are a few things worth pointing out explicitly as I got similar questions about these from various people.

The first thing is that Inqlude is meant to be a collection of pointers to releases, web sites, documentation, packages. It's not meant to host the actual code, tar balls, or any other content belonging to the libraries. There are plenty of ways how to do that in a better way, and all the projects out there already have something. Inqlude is just meant to be the central hub, where to find them all.

Another thing which came up from time to time is the question of dependencies. We don't want to implement yet another package management system, or another dependency resolver. So there we rely on integration with the native tools and mechanisms of the platforms, we run on. Still it would be nice to express dependencies in the meta data somehow, so that you have an easy way to judge, what you will need to run a given library. We will need to find a way how to do that in the best way, maybe a tier concept, like KDE Frameworks 5 is using it, would do the trick.

Finally I would like to stress that Inqlude is open to proprietary libraries as well. The infrastructure and the tooling is all free software, but Inqlude is meant as an open project to collect all libraries which are valuable for users on the same terms. The license is part of the meta data, so it's transparent to users, under which terms the library can be used, and this also allows to categorize libraries on the web site according to these terms. There still is a little bit of work missing to do that in a nice way, but that will be done soon. Free software libraries of course do have the advantage, that all information, code, and packages, is directly available, and can be accessed immediately.

Future

There are a couple of short term goals I have for Inqlude, mostly to clean up loose ends from the work which happened during the last couple of weeks:

• Collect and accurately present generic information about libraries, which is not tied to a release. This is particularly relevant for providing a place for libraries, which are under development and haven't seen a formal release yet.
• As said above, the listing of proprietary libraries needs some work to categorize the data according to the license. Then we can display libraries of all licenses nicely on the web site.
• Currently we have one big entry for the Qt base libraries. It would be nice to split this up and list the main modules of Qt separately, so it's easier to get an overview of their functionality, and use them in a modular way.

There also are a number of longer term goals. Some of them include:

• Integration with Qt Designer, so that available libraries can be listed from within the IDE, and being used in your own development without having to deal with external tools, separate downloads or stuff like that.
• Build packages in the Open Build Service, so that ready-to-use binary packages are available for all the major Linux distributions. This possibly could be automated, so that ideally putting up the meta data on Inqlude would be all what it takes to generate native packages for openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.
• Integration with distributions, so that libraries can be installed from inqlude via the native package management systems. This already works for openSUSE provided the meta data is there, but it would be nice to expand this support to other systems as well.
• Upstream the meta data, so that it can be maintained where it's most natural. To keep the data up to date it  would be best, if the upstream developers maintain it at the same place and in the same way as they also maintain the library itself. This needs a little bit of thought and tooling to make it convenient and practical, and it's probably something we only want to do when the format has settled down and is stable enough to not change frequently anymore.

There might be more things you would like to see to happen in Inqlude. I'm always happy about feedback, so let me know.

This was and is a fun side project for me. It's amazing what you can achieve with the help of the community and by putting together mostly existing bits and pieces.