Brief OctoMY™ update 2023

These are the changes scheduled for early to mid 2023 in the OctoMY™ project:

• Good bye Qt5 hello Qt6
• Refactoring of subsystems relating to media such as speech, video streaming etc
• Once-over of whole project
• New build system

Good bye Qt5 hello Qt6

Perhaps a little overdue, we finally support Qt6. Since we didn't really have a usable build in Qt5, we have just put that behind us and we are going all inn on Q6.

Media subsystem

This derives partly from the Qt6 transition as Qt6 introduced many changes in the underlying media related APIs and partly from the initial implementations in OctoMY™ showing it's age as many were the first parts of the codebase to be implemented and they have suffered from systemic neglect ever since.

Once-over

With a Qt version update and lots of refactoring there is always a risk of introducing lots of healthy little bugs, so this step means simply looking it over and adding tests where they are needed, running all the parts of the oprogram to see if any bugs show up.

New build system

With Qt6 came the astonishingly pragmatic (near-sighted?) decision by Qt project to move Qt away from qmake and on to CMake. The first part I completely understand, while I have learned to love qmake it still is a flawed little program and not really feasible for a large project such as Qt.

The second part of the decision; to transition to CMake feels like substituting pest for cholera. Time will tell if this was a great idea, especialkly since they had an alternative at their hands that shows a lot of rpomise as a proper next generation alternative, namely Qbs.

OctoMY™ project has some build needs that are difficult to express in either build system (being able to not maintain lists of files that are part of the project up front, and being able to dynamically chose wether a library should be linked separately or not) so we will look at adopting Qbs. So far it seems it will suit OctoMY™ quite nicely.