asermersheim

Cross platform portability is a major goal of the CopperSpice project. Autotools may be old but it still beats its competitors for portability to obscure platforms.

We have removed moc and added templates but it is by no means black magic. The complexities are below the surface and we worked very hard to create a clean API for developers.

Since you mention you are on MSVC which is a bit behind the curve in standards compliance, you may be unaware of the wonderful tools that C++11 now provides for generating simple and readable template error messages. We have made extensive use of static assertions for specifically this reason. The vast majority of errors are quite straightforward.

As a bonus, many conditions which are run time errors in Qt are caught and diagnosed at compile time in CopperSpice. I will take a compile error, however inscrutable, over a guaranteed runtime failure any day.

Its a fork of Qt by a guy who wants to see how much cleaner you can make the framework using a modern version of the language

A very astute observation. Actually, it's a fork of Qt by a girl and a guy but the rest of your statement is spot on.

There is no way we could merge back upstream, but that is not because we forked from 4.8. It is because statements made by several key individuals in the Qt project indicate that our changes would not be welcome and they see no reason to remove moc.

CopperSpice is a fork of Qt 4.8 but we have evolved considerably past the Qt version we started from.

We switched the build system to autotools in order to get away from the brittle and complex bootstrap system that Qt must maintain.

With respect to your comment about 'a pittance of work' here are some current numbers from CopperSpice:

43426 files changed, 2062325 insertions(+), 7974133 deletions(-)

Since CopperSpice is an open source project released under the GPL & LGPL, we are not looking to profit from it nor can we. Now, if someone throws money at us, we certainly will not refuse. But we did this for the love of the game.

We just found out about this thread 10 minutes ago, and we have been on reddit for the past 8 hours answering questions. We are stunned by the level of interest and feedback.

We have been using git from day 1 in house for our version control and that will be available to the public shortly.

We have been focusing on outreach to the local SF Bay area developer community, and we presented CopperSpice at the SF Bay Area Association of C/C++ users meeting in February. You are welcome to peruse the meeting notes and our slides:

http://www.meetup.com/SFBay-Association-of-C-C-Users/events/... https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sxei-Em6cnYbE0Zj16j6...

In terms of 'backing any of it up', the code speaks for itself. I am happy to answer any specific questions you may have.

We had everything set up on sourceforge and we hit the limits of what we could accomplish on sourceforge last month.

We have been moving everything including downloads and forums to a better location. We have not yet moved the git repo to a publicly accessible location, but this is in progress. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, and I apologize for the inconvenience.