Re: Opie's future

I was thinking about writing in that thread since few days but wanted to 
look what other developers see.

Dnia środa, 16 listopada 2005 17:22, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer napisał:

> 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:

> * Sharp dropping the Zaurus from all but the japanese markets
> * No attractive Qtopia devices since years

Those are interesting. Trolltech is telling us that many companies are 
going to release (or released) Qtopia (Phone or PDA) devices. Maybe there 
was few of them in Asia but I did not notice any of them in Europe. 
Recently Nokia released 770 and it was prepared to launch in such way 
that every IT service wrote something about it. For me it looks like 
'attractive !Qtopia device' - where are Qtopia ones? I does not want much 
- portrait LinuxPDA with VGA screen, SD slot and BT/WiFi (or atleast one 
of them + CF slot) - it does not even need to have a keyboard. But there 
is no such thing - closest is one of PocketPC devices + Linux kernel 
without any support from vendor.

> * Opie still using the (outdated) Qt/Embedded 2.3.x
> * OpenZaurus being binary incompatible with Qtopia apps

Those are another thing.. OE/OZ team had to decide: use old gcc 2.95 which 
was marked obsolete by all Linux distributions years ago (but be 
compatible with Qtopia) or go ahead and use something fresh (gcc 3.x). 
Now many of apps prepared for Qtopia enviroment need patches to get built 
(even to get build with newer QT/E 2.3.x then 2.3.2 used by Sharp). Not 
to mention that most of those apps are unmaintained since 2002. If Qtopia 
platform is so great why they are not maintained?

> * Opie and Qtopia diverging in source level APIs
> * Unclear Opie roadmap, goals, and identity

I started to use OPIE in 2004 when bought Zaurus SL-5500 because I wanted 
to have PDA where I can decide what will run and how it will be. Sooner 
or later I started to tweak/hack to get things how I wanted to get them. 
It was work on geting OpenZaurus 3.5.0 booting, things like 
'anycol.patch' which added possibility to have any amount of columns in 
OPIE launcher tabs and other tweaks. I never touched Qtopia enviroment 
other then OPIE one. 

> These reasons not only affected Opie directly but also third party
> authors writing applications based on the Qtopia API.

> 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.

Since I have VGA device I tweaked OPIE in many places to get it looking 
better on !QVGA screen. But I do not feel that Qtopia platform has any 
future with QT/Embedded (any version). How many killer apps we have? 
Nearly zero. There is no RTF editor, no OpenDocument viewer/editor, 
spreadsheets does not exists... I do not want to stick with 
sharp-compat-libs and tools written in 2001-2003. 

For me future of OPIE is going to QT/X11 4.x instead of keeping on 
Qt/Embedded (even 4.x). This way we can get best from two worlds - 
selected (maintained) OPIE apps and any killer apps from X11 world. I do 
not see any future in QT/Embedded world but thats because I want my 
Zaurus (and who know which will replace it) to be not only PDA with PIM 
and few apps but something closer to 'Personal Mobile Tool' like it has 
written on case. If I have an article to proofread and fix why I have to 
convert it to plain text first to edit it on PDA? I want to start 
something which will open OpenDocument (or any other format with 
formatting) and give me possibility to fix it without losing alarms from 
PIM suite. And I don't want to go to X11 world without OPIE - prefer QT 
then GTK (and GPE enviroment needs lot of tweaking).

> The future of Linux on mobile devices has just begun and it's exciting
> to be a part of it.

-- 
JID: hrw-jabber.org
Palmtop: Sharp Zaurus C760
OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus developer
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