Re: Opie's future

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 02:22 am, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 16.11.2005, 09:12 -0500 schrieb Neuman, Ben J., A&M
>
> IRM:
> > I am a huge fan of the work you guys have done on Opie and am very sad to
> > hear it's future might be in jeopardy. Is this true?
>
> It is - somewhat - true. If you recapitulate the history of Opie you
> will notice that there was a time when we had ~20 contributors. Most of
> them have jumped ship due to several reasons. The most important ones
> are [in my subjective view of order of relevance]:
>
> * Sharp dropping the Zaurus from all but the japanese markets
I don't agree with this one. Take the ipaq for example. It doesn't even ship 
with linux, but that doesn't stop people using Opie and Gpe on them.

> * Opie still using the (outdated) Qt/Embedded 2.3.x
I don't agree with this one. Qt/E 2.3 is still perfectly usable.

> * OpenZaurus being binary incompatible with Qtopia apps
This is the major factor, I believe. Also add no easily available cross 
compiler that is compatible with OpenZaurus softfloat. Development is too 
high of hurdle. No one wants to fuss around with openembedded when all they 
want is to develop applications.

> * Opie and Qtopia diverging in source level APIs
> * No attractive Qtopia devices since years (Yes, I know about Olympus
> and Archos)
This never stopped GPE.

> * Unclear Opie roadmap, goals, and identity
I do not think Opie _ever_ had these, except identity, which I do think Opie 
has it's own. and I do not recall ever seeing any formal discussions about 
these.

> These reasons not only affected Opie directly but also third party
> authors writing applications based on the Qtopia API.
>
> Nowadays, a major part of the remaining Opie contributors seem to be
> more interested in going away from Qt/Embedded since 
> a) X no longer is bloaty or slow compared to Qt/Embedded and 
I'd like to see clear evidence of this. In my experience, Gpe is too slow to 
use on a 5000d.

> b) a small community like us 
> no longer can afford ruling out millions of applications just because of
> direct framebuffer access.
I don't think the majority of linux desktop applications are suitable for use 
on a Pda. You still have to touch them up for small screens, and 
keypad/button navigation.
Not sure there are 'millions' of them, either. 
We need to concentrate on developing/maintaining just a few good applications.


> Still we very much love Qt as an application 
> development framework and want to continue using it.
>
> Personally, I consider Opie being more or less frozen except for
> bugfixes and perhaps additional device adaptions. I just can't stand the
> limitations of Qt 2.x any longer and I quit believing in the value of
> exclusive framebuffer access.
These are personal opinions that I do not agree with.
There are limitations in any software, but we do have x11 access with Qtopia 
and Opie - xqt (which should probably be integrated into Opie in an optional 
way).

> That aside, I'm still very interested in writing open source software
> for mobile linux devices and I hope that -- after completing my Ph.D.
> next summer -- I can return to writing software for X11-based mobile
> devices using Qt/X11 4.x and/or Gtkmm/Hildon.


> The future of Linux on mobile devices has just begun and it's exciting
> to be a part of it.
I do not see Nokia's experiment as the start of some great new Linux embedded 
Utopia.
The future seems to be smartphones (qtopia phone has sold way better than 
qtopia pda). Pda sales and interest is dwindling.


-- 
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Trolltech Qtopia Community Manager
Opie Core Developer
http://qtopia.net
_______________________________________________

http://opie.handhelds.org/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/DeveloperWikiIndex

Opie-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://handhelds.org/mailman/listinfo/opie-devel