[crossfire] Qt experiments

[Mark Wedel]

  Just my one slightly relevant data point on Qt:

  The few times I compiled Qt for Solaris, it was a lot of work.  Its been a 
while now, but some of this was the large number of dependencies to install 
before compiling Qt, but Qt itself had some oddities.

  That said, the number of people running the server on solaris is near 0, and I 
don't think it even compiles right now due to changes/removals of various checks 
from configure (in most cases, there was a reason behind why those checks where 
put in the configure scripts in the first place).

  But my thought is that if some new platform (non linux/bsd/windows) shows up 
and someone wants to run the server on it, from my experience above, using Qt 
may be as much a hindrance as a help.

  And while there is some amount of platform/OS specific code in crossfire, it 
is fairly minor and probably a fair amount of the remaining bits could be 
cleaned up.  The computer world is much different now than it was 20+ years ago 
(when there was a dozen different varieties of unix, POSIX standards were not as 
complete, etc).

  My personal philosophy when I had time to spend time on crossfire was to try 
and keep the dependencies that the server needs to a minimum, simply because in 
many cases, the environment where the server would run had a more minimal 
installation or were a loaned resource such that it wasn't easy for the person 
running the server to install additional dependencies.