Re: Opie and OpenEmbedded

Hello Michael,

Saturday, October 14, 2006, 2:43:11 PM, you wrote:

> Dear Opie developers,
[]
> I'd like to encourage someone of the active Opie developers
> to take care about everything Opie (and consequently Qt/Embedded)
> in OpenEmbedded.

  I followed situation around OPIE for some before your mail, and even
more closely after it. I know from communication on IRC that many more
people did. We all waited if someone with OPIE experience will respond
to this call, and appears that nobody did. Taking into account that
OPIE removal from OE is already being scheduled, and after considering
the current situation OPIE has in OE, gathering up what I can offer towards
supporting/improving the situation, and taking some encouragement from
members of the community, I would like to propose myself for
maintaining OPIE packages and images in OE.

  I should start with admitting that what I am looking for is
maintenance in the basic meaning of this word. I don't have interest
in developing OPIE (at least, at this time). I don't have OPIE CVS
commit access. And I don't even have experience with OPIE or even QT
code (apart from libopie2). So, why would I want to maintain it in OE?

1. I should start with expressing deep gratitude to all OPIE authors,
developers, contributors, maintainers for raising such a great
user environment. It would be worth to maintain OPIE just as a tribute
to their work.

2. But OPIE is indeed not just a collection of several programs,
written per their authors' likes. It is a whole, integrated
environment, offering applications for all basic needs a user of a
handheld may have. Such environment simply cannot be put aside and be
gone. It won't happen anyway ;-). But it would be much better that
OPIE was preserved where it has always been and not in random forks.

3. Due to my greenness in Embedded Linux world, I have, so to say, a
"fresh new look" of what OPIE is - a thing in itself. As argued above,
it has notable, real-world value on its own. The questions like: on
what low-level toolkit it was built, with what other environments it
is/should be compatible, and whether "upstream" provides enough
support for it - are all auxiliary questions with such easy view of things.
Of course, I may foresee immediate argument: "But anyone who does
spend some time with OPIE *will* start to care of such issues."
Wonderful, I say. Let people be able to use OPIE. Let people use OPIE.
Let people fall in love with it. Let people start to care about it and
its future. With that all, OPIE is still not a lure - it offers
real-world value, once again. So, all unconcerned people may just use
it as is.

4. I have to admit that I find all graphical environments stuff to be
a pretty mundane matter. Somehow, I lost my faith in bright future of
GUIs, seeing demise of such things as Garnet/Amulet or
InterViews/Berlin/Fresco ;-( . Idea of using industry-standard
client-server architecture on handhelds makes me think not of cool
possibilities, but of latencies involved. I have fully pragmatic,
down-to-earth attitude towards this: tweaking anything already working
well is better then exerting efforts towards anything completely new.
So, based on this, I seem like having the attitude pretty suitable for
maintaining OPIE - subscribing to it today, I'm not going to find
tomorrow the next big thing. (Don't get me wrong - I think
that UI environment/interaction is important field of research and
work, I just leave it to those who have motivation (preferably as
having to do that as part if their job ;-) ). Anyway, if something
cool new appears, I hope to hear about it in a couple of years ;-) ).

5. A word about user community. Linux available for handhelds for
quite some time now, but still has pretty limited, "niche" community.
It means that every user, or potential user, of Embedded Linux
in general (not specific to any product) is important. We cannot just
tell people: "We used to have a nice working user environment, but got
some issues with it and idea that we could do something better. Thanks
everyone, come again in few years." That's unwise - community building
question must have been an important topic for some time now. So, I
consider it is very important to preserve continuity of support
offerings. I really believe that revolutions won't work with such
small user base, but will just outthrow the entire community to dark
ages. So, I'd like to maintain OPIE in (at least) its current form,
until something appear which can be clearly seen as its superseder,
let that be OPIE upgrade, rewrite, or GPE at all. It's not the case
currently. Even if it's general trend for OPIE to be superceded, it's
worth to maintain it for now to preserve (and extend!) Embedded Linux
userbase in the meantime. Of course, I don't cherish illusion of being
able to support them all. Instead, I believe in building self-support
community. And besides, if 1 contributor/developers comes out of 20
users, it is worth to have thousands of users ;-) (now I mean, for it
to to become tens of thousands right to the arrival of brave new thing
;-) ).


    Ok, as you see, I have put some thought into why I would like to be
a maintainer. More importantly, I checked that OPIE in OE actually
builds and runs (with minor changes) on the devices I have access to
(which is 3 ipaq models, which also proves my technical abilities to
maintain (of course, I would need help from other device
communities)).

    So, what is left for my proposal in to outline my maintenance
plan. But I will send it separately tomorrow or on Monday, in the
meantime pondering how to make it more concise read ;-).



Thank you,

-- 
 Paul                            mailto:[email protected]

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