Qtopia Phone Licensing Issue

[Tilman Baumann]

Lorn Potter wrote:
> Tilman Baumann wrote:
>> Lorn Potter wrote:
>>
>>>> src/3rdparty is where Trolltech for insane reasons known only to
>>>> themselves had imported libraries from community they use. 
>>>
>>> Not insane reasons at all, just not known to you. We have perfectly 
>>> legitimate reasons for doing thing this.
>>>
>>>> They link
>>>> against these versions rather than the ones from any other source and
>>>> there doesnt appear to be configure options to stop this.
>>>
>>> The reason for this, is that our customers wanted one package, and 
>>> did not want to have to hunt around the net for these. As well, we 
>>> wanted to provide specific versions known to work.
>>
>> I don't know. Aren't your customers developers?
> 
> Our customers are businesses that employ developers, not the developers 
> themselves.
They pay the bills (and make dump requests about self contained build 
systems?), but the people who use it are coders. *g*

>> (At least all experienced linux developers i know. Including me.)
> 
> Let's see...choose between just one download package that is known to 
> work, or try and hunt around the net for several packages (and 
> dependencies) that may or may not work.. hmmmm....
Works 99%.
And it only takes little experience to find problems or to know where to 
expect them.
Almost every opensource project works this way. And they usually work fine.
And if not, most of the pain will be taken away from the distributors 
anyway.

I would rather have a INSTALL text with suggested versions which i can 
_choose_ to use. Or a overexcited configure script that cries about 
missing dependencies and versions.

I don't think most of your dependencies are so exotic that they are not 
already installed on a typical development machine anyway.

I give you credit, building multimedia libs tends to suck very hard.
This might be a point where i would like to use a set of pre made libs.
But i like to choose.

I choose the libs on my system wisely, and i hate if something needlsly 
thinks it knows better...
If it would tell me
"this will not work with your version ox XY, i really need this 
version... Please install or let me do it for you",
i would be thankful for the support.
But if something (needlessly) forces decisions on me i get really mad.

>> Without wanting to point fingers, whenever i see something like this 
>> it is usually a lame excuse for not having a working build system.
>> Enough, it's really not about accusations but rather to tell you that 
>> i disagree completely.
> 
> Thats fine, but you do (most likely) not have our customers. They asked 
> for an easier way to download qt + qtopia + extra stuff, and that is 
> what we provided.

Ok, if you are sure about this. Trolltech might then be the first 
company that made this decision based on educated opinions and real 
demand. *g*

I might even be a bit biased because i work at a company where we 
maintain our own distribution. And _every time_ we get a software 
package that is self-contained we have trouble with it.
But there you have my opinion. :)

Regards
  Tilman