[p4] Fwd: p4v 2007.3 and Qt "styles"

[Rick Macdonald]

Arnt - thanks, you helped me get to the bottom of it all.

I have the Qt3 version of qtconfig. It writes out to ~/.qt/qtrc. A style 
setting in the General section of this file does indeed affect old 
versions of p4v, such as p4v 2006.1, but not 2007.3 which is Qt4.

I don't have a Qt4 version qtconfig. I ran strace on p4v 2007.3 starting 
up, and looked at all the files that might hold a style setting in the 
[General] section. I found p4v-2007.3.151553/bin/qt.conf which comes 
with p4v, and ~/.config/Trolltech.conf. I added the General section to 
both but it had no effect.

Then I installed Qt4 on my Debian system to get qtconfig-qt4, and ran 
it, and set the style. It wrote out to ~/.config/Trolltech.conf but this 
time it worked! The difference was that qtconfig-qt4 put style=windows 
in both a [General] section and a [Qt] section. Testing shows that it's 
the [Qt] that makes it work.

Unfortunately, the [Qt] style setting has no effect if placed in the 
p4v-supplied file p4v-2007.3.151553/bin/qt.conf. That would have made it 
easy to deliver and install.

The ~/.config/Trolltech.conf directory and file are created the first 
time you run p4v if it doesn't exist. If the file exists and contains 
only the [Qt] section and the style setting, p4v appends the other 
things that it would have created the file with. This means that a 
wrapper script could:

- create ~/.config and the Trolltech.conf file with the style setting if 
they don't exist
- append the [Qt] and style setting if the conf file exists but doesn't 
contain the style setting.

So, all is finally well in terms of a get-around, but it's a bit fiddly.

The qtconfig-qt4 program also showed me the proper list of Qt4 styles:
CDE
Cleanlooks
Motif
Plastique
Windows

Thanks Arnt!

Rick

Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
> Hm... sounds like support either didn't know about Qt settings even 
> though there is an enhancement request, or p4v goes to some length to 
> disable Qt's settings code. The former sounds odd, the latter very 
> much so.
>
> Qt applications generally look for settings in several files. In p4v's 
> case I would expect it to look in /etc/qtrc, ~/.qt/qtrc and 
> ~/.p4v/something, and it might create one or more of those files too.
>
> These files are (mostly) ASCII, you can edit them with a text editor. 
> You want to set the [General] style setting to Windows, like this:
>
>     [General]
>     style=Windows
>
> You may also find that you have a program called qtconfig. If you do, 
> you can use it to configure this and a few other aspects of Qt.
>
> On Windows, all this is stored in the registry. On the Mac it's carbon 
> preferences. If you want it on mac/windows I'd try installing qtconfig 
> and looking to see which precise registry setting or carbon preference 
> setting qtconfig changes.
>
> Arnt
>