Nix wrote:

Of course this would still pull in the X shared libraries, incurring
most of the startup costs nonetheless. Fixing *that* would be a lot more
work. (Also, who knows how many places inside Qt3 assume the existence
of a live X display connection? After all, they've always had one they
can rely on.)

Trolltech did the separation in Qt4.  Their major libraries are libQtCore, libQtGui, libQtMultimedia.so, and libQtNetwork.so.  The other libraries essentially add on additional functionality.

The same sort of thing could be done with Qt3, but I question the value.  If someone is building a new application, they would probably just build it with Qt4.

   -- Bruce