Geert Hendrickx <ghen@netbsd.org> writes:

> I'm upgrading editors/texmaker to the latest version, which uses qt4, and
> I'm sure other programs will gradually be upgraded to qt4 as well.  Would
> it make sense if we keep "legacy" versions  of these programs (using qt3) 
> in pkgsrc?  Say e.g. editors/texmaker-qt3 (similar to *-gtk1 packages).  

First, I presume qt4 and qt3 can both be installed.
I'd say that if it's reasonable to want to run the old version, it
makes sense to keep a qt3 version of the package if the maintainer has
cycles to do it.

But if the qt3 version is no longer maintained (security fixes, etc.),
or one can make the statement "Discounting people who just object to
having qt4 on their systems, no one would rationally wish to refrain
from upgrading to the new version, then probably the older version
should be dropped.

A perhaps similar situation persisted with guile 1.4 and 1.6 for a
long time.  But that's a harder situation because of library
dependencies - and would argue for keeping qt3 around, not building
programs against it.  Gnucash was changed to use guile 1.6, but I
gather qt3->qt4 is such a change one needs new versions of the
qt-using packages, not just compiling it against a different version.



-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>