[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] RFC: Qtopia Nokia N770 (maemo) porting layer

[From: klaus at rotters.de]

Am 7 Nov 2005 um 22:17 hat Holger Freyther geschrieben:
> How such a port would look like:
> 	-We would use Qt2/X11 and make it look like the maemo gui
> 	-We would implement libqpe,libqtopia, libqtopia1, libqtopiapim
>            using osso, hildon and Qt2
> 	-In the future we should use Qt4 but that would require more porting
>           of the applications.

Why are you trying this? I would recommend porting the whole OPIE to the N770. 
That would be an alternative to Maemo. I personally feel a little bit home using Qt.
Using both Maemo & Qt would be a waste of resources. Do you remember the 
harmony project? Some tried to reimplement Qt 1.x - they never got far. Ok, there 
where some "political" problems as well. The OPIE folks seek for volunteers to help 
them. It would be better to support the OPIE project and provide a "clean" N770 port 
rather to implement the same GUI again and again. There are far too many GUIs 
available for Linux - maybe that's one of the problems Linux has. And far too many 
GUIs which aren't further developed. We should really stay with gtk+ here, or use 
OPIE to get Qt programs running. May the better system win :-)

_OFF_TOPIC_ON_

An other solution would be to port the couple of programs which are missing on 
Maemo e.g. KO/Pi (http://www.pi-sync.net/html/ko_pi.html) to Maemo. Of course, that 
would be a lot of work but maybe less work than a clean room implementation of qt. 

Qt has other problems: Trolltech made each major release of qt incompatible to its 
predecessor. This is IMHO a major design fault. A lot of companies which use Qt still 
use the qt2 release. 

_ANGRY_MODE_ON_

My programs for Qtopia don't run on OPIE! That sucks! Linux has too may 
incompatibilities created - Libc5 to glibc, gcc1 to gcc2 to gcc 2.95 to gcc3. Are the 
gcc4 libs compatible with gcc3? I don't know... BUT I can still run a lot of programs, 
original written for Win95 on my WinXP box. Try this with linux software written in the 
years 95-97. No chance to get bin programs to run! And even to compile them is a 
little bit hard. 

_ANGRY_MODE_OFF_

Don't get me wrong: I like to have the possiblities with my Linux system. And I also 
like that the N770 device runs with Linux. But Maemo is still a new, incompatible 
system (ok there's some compatibility with gtk+) and writing a compatibility layer for 
Qt makes the situation even worse. Better use OPIE. And if OPIE is the  better 
system, a lot of people will install it on their N770 and use it - if not, stay with Maemo 
and write the software for it. Keep it small and simple, and may be, a little bit faster 
that it is now... :-)

_OFF_TOPIC_OFF_

Just my two cents, -Klaus

-- 
 Klaus Rotter * klaus <at> rotters <dot> de * www.rotters.de