Who's Got To Go? Qtopia, Opie?

[lpotter]

If we can get a-d together and make it work like it should, we stand a chance of having further HW, and maybe MickeyL and CoreDump hired by some company that develops Opie for a living.

However, I also suggest to read MickeyLs posting in that thread
for some further thoughs on the whole debate. I'm not completely agreeing with him, but the he's got a point on that matter, and he's the developer.

for one thing, mickey is not THE opie developer. There are several of us. One of us is even hired by Trolltech.

[mussi]

I know MickeyL's not the only Opie developer. However, he's possibly the most vocal one, and together with CoreDump, the only one regularly hanging around on forums, especially also the zaurus.help4free.de one.

The point behind this poll was actually to see which side got more support - the Sharp ROM side, or the OpenZaurus side, and, on that, the most powerful faction, which turns out to be Opie.

The rest of my thoughs have been laid out earlier.

[saiten]

Well in all my years I've never seen such a lame topic

How about "who's got to go first" - "posters of naff topics or Bill Gates"

[lpotter]

The point behind this poll was actually to see which side got more support - the Sharp ROM side, or the OpenZaurus side, and, on that, the most powerful faction, which turns out to be Opie.

Looks to be even to me.
But Qtopia is not only on the Sharp rom.

[mussi]

I know Qtopia is not only on the Sharp ROM - I implictely included Tkc-ROM and sons-of-Sharp-ROMs.

[technojunkie]

_Qtopia_ 2.1 syncs fine with Qtopia Desktop 2.1.  The Zaurus might be dead in the US / Euro market, but Sharp is not Trolltech's only customer. Qtopia Phone devices will be emerging this next year in places, as well as new handheld devices.

There is no 'porting' Qtopia 2.1 to the Zaurus, it already runs on it.

OK 'porting'  wasn't exactly the proper term. Yes QT 2.1 WILL run on a zaurus without problem. BUT there are no prepackaged ROMS with it (that I have seen).

I didn't mean to imply Sharp was Trolltechs only customer, All I was saying is that  If Sharp's market keeps decreasing,  and Sharp doesn't pursue packaging 2.1 with its newer devices there isn't much incentive for trolltech to focus on the Zaurus. Especially with smartphones and other devices just waiting to make them money.

As for Sync, I'm not interested in a backup on my PC, I want integration of my palmtop PIM and my desktop including my work PC. So i'm srry I won't touch QTopia desktop. I am stuck with MS outlook for better or worse, and have to sync with outlook.

If it weren't for that I'd drop both PIM apps and get Ko/Pi Ka/Pi

[lpotter]

OK 'porting'  wasn't exactly the proper term. Yes QT 2.1 WILL run on a zaurus without problem. BUT there are no prepackaged ROMS with it (that I have seen).


As for Sync, I'm not interested in a backup on my PC, I want integration of my palmtop PIM and my desktop including my work PC. So i'm srry I won't touch QTopia desktop. I am stuck with MS outlook for better or worse, and have to sync with outlook.

If it weren't for that I'd drop both PIM apps and get Ko/Pi Ka/Pi

There will be qtopia 2.1 shortly...

Whats wrong with qtopia desktop? Qtopia Desktop sync's with outlook. QD 2.1 should be released soon.

[guylhem]

Mussi, I perfectly understand the purpose of your poll. It's not like the linux market several years ago as someone suggested: there aren't many hardware commercially available where qtopia/opie can run reliably. Basically the Zaurus or nothing at all.

The difference is much greater than a "distro war" ie redhat/slackware/suse/debian etc - here we have a toolkit fork. Distribution is just about packaging. Toolkits are about basic compatibility - it's a pain to create an application that work both on opie and qtopia. And it shouldn't be painful ! Can you imagine where we'd be today if KDE or GNOME had split in two directions? Don't forget that there're much less developpers for handheld than on the Linux desktops.

Another problem: there's not lots of space on a PDA. You could back then run both KDE and GNOME on a PC, but having both Opie *and* Qtopia on so few mb- bad idea.

Anyway as technojunkie said, the real issue is applications. "drop both PIM apps and get Ko/Pi Ka/Pi" ? You're right on the spot. Forget side issues, and do the best apps.

Forget side issues, like commercial stuff, license, "eye candy", "beautiful code", or tiny problems with either qtopia or opie.

A simple question: what would bring in more free and non free applications to the Zaurus?

I'd say compatibility. Write one application, have it run on every machine out there- whether it uses opie qtopia or something-else-rom. Don't make a hell of the developpers life.

If you want my 2 ¢ solutions, the best way to fix the situation right now is a serious change in OPIE: focus on applications and compatibility. Call in "opie3" or whatever, and create apps for qtopia 2.1 or any future version. Nothing but apps/gui stuff, and the needed compatibility parts where there are no free equivalents yet - such as a zaurus-side zsrep for synchronisation. Focus on *compatibility* - even if the solution might be not as good.

Take the best there is, like aqpkg, kopi, kapi, gaim, zsrep. etc. and make them even better. Don't tweak qte/qpe - there no reason. If there's a life threatening lib or function that's missing, a) suggest it to trolltech and  if there's no reply, put in in a libopie3 that's as small as possible, with the hope it will be merged back in the next version of qtopia.

That would require a serious change of mentalities, :-/

[guylhem]

mussi, I understand the purpose of your poll.

It's not like the "distro wars" as someone suggested (debian vs redhat vs slackware vs suse etc) - distributions just package content. Here it's a toolkit for - basically as if KDE had split in its early days in two concurrent sub versions.  A toolkit means compatibilty - it's not possible at the moment to have both opie and qtopia with the small space available on a PDA. Even if it was, it's a pain to create an application working for both, and that prevents ppl from writing apps. Hey, that's the most important on any machine - applications ! That's where the concerns should be - not on who has the sexiest toolkit of if it's not possible in some dirty way to live with both. Having both incompatible toolkits prevents applications from being developped.

Mickey saw exactly the problem when he said a decision must quickly be taken. IMHO the quickest fix is to redefine the roles of each : leave the toolkit to qtopia, focus on apps on opie.  Start from scratch with qtopia 2.1, and release apps. Just apps that are missing (qpe-gaim ...) or non free on qtopia.

Then qtopia and opie will not be opposed but cooperative instead.

It would require some serious rework and changes but I believe that's the best and quickest way to fix things - and it may create enough momentum to fix other things (ex: bring more developpers to this successfull platform, bring more applications, change trolltech mind to let the community participate to the devel process)

As technojunkie said about kopi/kapi, there're applications that are just the best, and which should be used on both.

Take that approach even further- find out the best apps, and make them even better. Leave the rom release/hacking it all together job to other projects. Cacko and others proove that this won't be a problem :-)

[lpotter]

I couldnt agree with you more, guylhem. But I think Opie could exist as an extension to qtopia.
Compatibility is strength. I have always believed that.

[guylhem]

twell if you agree and mickey sees a possible solution, what about a cease fire and starting again with something constructive ?

I really hope the situation can be fixed.

What could TT do to help that happen? (hint: create a new trust-based partnership with the community, with small things like publishing work in progress for the upcoming v4, GPLing some parts if needed (ex: sync), forwarding requests like softfloat support to licensees [sharp will soon publish roms with qtopia 2.1 and kernel 2.6.9 according to the rumor. Suggest them to go the whole 9 yards with soft float !...])

Smalls things will (re)create goodwill and maybe help opie community and fanbase to work on new objectives. And I'm a big OPIE fan.

Hey, I'll try to publish a new analysis soon to voice all these thoughts.

PS Sorry for the dupe, thought the forum had eaten my first msg

[lpotter]

twell if you agree and mickey sees a possible solution, what about a cease fire and starting again with something constructive ?

I really hope the situation can be fixed.

What could TT do to help that happen? (hint: create a new trust-based partnership with the community, with small things like publishing work in progress for the upcoming v4, GPLing some parts if needed (ex: sync), forwarding requests like softfloat support to licensees [sharp will soon publish roms with qtopia 2.1 and kernel 2.6.9 according to the rumor. Suggest them to go the whole 9 yards with soft float !...])

Smalls things will (re)create goodwill and maybe help opie community and fanbase to work on new objectives. And I'm a big OPIE fan.

Hey, I'll try to publish a new analysis soon to voice all these thoughts.

PS Sorry for the dupe, thought the forum had eaten my first msg

heh,... your really dreamin' on that 2.1 rom from Sharp.

[JohnKiniston]

heh,... your really dreamin' on that 2.1 rom from Sharp.

Is it as much of a dream to dream of a 2.1 image from the OpenZaurus people?

They already provide a Opie image, a GPE image and a no GUI image.

Does the license for the 2.1 qtopia allow people other than trolltech to distribute it in rom images?

[lpotter]

I meant there is probably no hope that Sharp will produce any qtopia 2.1 roms for Zaurus.

[mussi]

And that's exactly the reason why we have to take the decision for Sharp, how much Sharp might like or not like it. The world has to go on.

There might be a way that Sharp starts using Qtopia 2.1/Opie2 - and that's when OZ does it, and did all the work for it. I suspect that Sharp might sleep in a 'made' bed, and have us develop most of the kernel and the widget toolset, and just supply hardware and some applications that can't easily be created by opensource developpers (like Japanese-English dictionaries with copyrighted information).

Or we simply improve on apps. But that wouldn't make the problem MickeyL pointed out smaller, since we'd always run after a moving target, and that's the Qtopia x.y version. If we had a commitment from TrollTech that any future Qtopia/Opie app that compiles on 2.1 also compiles without modification on x.y, there could be a point to move to Qtopia. However, this seems unlikely to me. OTOH, moving to Enlightenement is also highly risky as we would lose most of our codebase (75% if MickeyLs worst prognostics come true) if we changed. So maybe keeping Opie and just going for the applications is the best we can currently do. Since Qtopia 1.7 won't evolve, keeping Opie at this point and enhancing on Opie is probably the best thing we can do.

Maybe somebody who has a much better command of the Japanese language than me could explain that in a Japanese Zaurus forum?