About QtMoko future

Radek Polak psonek2 at seznam.cz
Mon May 9 13:08:49 CEST 2011


On Saturday 07 May 2011 17:20:50 Joif wrote:

> Hi list
> In the announcement of QtMoko v33 there were some discussions about the
> future of QtMoko.
> But to date, I have not a clear vision about the current situation and the
> future of QtMoko, so I want to ask some questions to developers.
> 1) QtMoko is based on Qt Extended, is this "Qt base" still in development
> or is it an ended project? I mean, the main work on QtMoko is about
> bringing new and improved code or about solving bugs?

Hi, much of the questions were already answered by Timo (thanks), i will try 
to add some more info.

To avoid confusion i will try to explain what QtMoko is. From historical point 
of view its:

qtopia => qt extended => qt extended improved => QtMoko

Please note that you cant use first three names for your projects, because they 
are trademarks of Nokia, so that's why QtMoko.

From technical point of view QtMoko is using regular Qt as framework for GUI, 
networking and other nice features that Qt supports. Qt is just compiled with 
custom configure switches. We can upgrade Qt from upstream and receive new Qt 
features quite easily.

On top of Qt there are additional libraries for modem, bluetooth, wireless... 
and programs like homescreen, dialer, bluetooth gui, media player. QtMoko is 
upstream of these programs and libs. They can look like dead from the GIT 
commit history, but they compile ok and are working well, so there is not much 
reason to touch them.

From my point of view there is nothing rotten in QtMoko except the build 
system which is no longer working with newer Qt because QtScript has been 
rewritten in upstream Qt and is no longer working in qbuild (qtmoko build 
system).

There are two ways to solve it - either fix it of switch the build system to 
something else - most probably cmake.

> 3) If FSO, how many parts of the current QtMoko have to be rewritten? Will
> FSO be more difficult to use (in terms of writing new code)?

It's hard to say now, i have just started with demo application that blinks 
leds and it was quite easy ;-)

> 4) What about Qt Mobility?

If there is anything useful there we can use it.

> 5) Will QtMoko still remain Debian-based? (I hope so! :) )

Sure, but not only debian, you can compile if for any rootfs. I am now using 
SHR unstable for work on FSO integration.

> 6) Is (or will be) there a way to write new apps (or modify extisting ones)
> in a relative easy way such as using Qt Creator?

I try to add QtCreator projects for all new projects and i try to make sure 
the apps work also on PC where you can debug them easily. I havent looked for 
more integration like automatic deploy and debugging on the device, but on the 
other hand scp & gdb good enough for me.


Regards

Radek


[1] https://github.com/radekp/qtmoko/tree/master/src/libraries/qfso



More information about the community mailing list