First success in Calligra’s 2nd port to Qt5 & KF5

Last month, in March, with the 2.9.0 release done, we Calligra developers followed our plans and started a branch named “frameworks”, to work on version 3.0, to be the first version based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. Calligra 3.0 should not see any new features, the focus is purely on getting the port to the new platform done without any regressions.

In a first phase we are currently trying to readd any libs, apps and plugins back to the build, adding TODOs for the second phase where simple changes are not enough.

A week ago finally we managed to get the first apps to start, e.g. Stage, Words and Sheets (somehow Oxygen icons still sneak into the UI for me):

A few things are still left to be added back to the build, before the next phase can be entered, where anything broken will be fixed. Some things are even already nicely working, e.g. the Calligra ODT plugin for Okular together with the Calligra DOC import filter make the (WIP and not yet released) Qt5/KF5-based Okular show a DOC sample file, like before with the Qt4-based versions:

“2nd port”, you might wonder? It happened that (some part of) Calligra was already once ported to Qt5, in 2013, to power the Documents app on the Jolla phone. Just it also happened to be unlucky timing, as the KF5 were only starting to exist, also was the Sailfish OS still at Qt 5.1 at that time, while KF5 was needing at least Qt 5.2. So that first port ended up as a dead branch. Still, some experiences made during the port had influence on changes to the Qt4 branches, and even a few of the old commits could be now cherry-picked and applied unchanged to the “frameworks” branch 🙂

No idea when Calligra 3.0 is good to be released. It’s done when it is done. We will work hard to make it done this year. In Q2 would be nice. In Q3 might be more realistic. Now, join the fun 🙂