On 09/18/2008 03:04 AM, Oliver Fels wrote:
> Which leads to what I call the "core of the Opie problem".
Actually Opie (as well as its ancestor Qtopis on the Z) is based on
Qt/Embedded 2.3.x which as a rather outdated version if one sees that Qt
has alread made its way through the 4.2 branches.
That means, on an application level, that there are 3 types of software
in the Opie feeds:
1.) applications which have followed the Qt/E upgrade path in the
meantime and which do not anymore support Qt/E 2.x
2.) applications which have been abandoned in the meantime
3.) applications which are still supported
Applications of type 3 are very rare and for type 1 and 2 Opie users
must stick with the old versions though risking that in the way the
distribution with all its dependencies and libraries evolve those Opie
applications will be subject to break some day.
Konqueror is a very good example here. What Paul is working on is to
bring an outdated version to work.
As a result new and exciting applications will not appear and old ones
will vanish if there are not enough people to fix the increasing issues.
It is like an old but beloved car. It still runs and does what I want
but the older it gets it is harder to keep alive as efforts increase,
spares are harder to find and if I would like to have a bit more comfort
in it, the challenge starts.
If the old car still runs well and doesn't cause too much global
warming, it's sufficient to drive it around for laundry and groceries.
Two possible solutions from that dilemma have been discussed:
- Open Opie up for X11 applications: Does not solve the problem itself
but is more of a migration path away from Opie to soften issues (mainly
lack of applications)
- Follow the migration path of Qt/E to 4.x: Would open up new
applications (eg. coming from current KDE releases) but requires a huge
amount of effort especially to also migrate existing applications and
libraries, doing some necessary redesign, etc.
This is attractive for non-PDA machines, however for PDA users, opie + a
modern core is powerful enough.
Regards
Gordon
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