Re: impromptu IRC meeting

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.homelinux.net>]

Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:

> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Neil Jerram wrote:
>
>> Why?  Because you all seem to be studiously ignoring QtMoko, a mobile distribution which is Debian-based, and which already exists and works rather well today.
>>
>> Is there something you don't like about QtMoko?
>
> IIRC up to now it hasn't been possible to add to Debian because it
> relie(s|d?) on an old version of Qt.

Many thanks for your reply to my question.  Gilles has already covered
most of the technical points.  I'll just add a few more thoughts.

> As a user, I don't like that it runs everything as root

Me too.  I didn't know about the work that Gilles pointed to, so I'm
happy to hear about that.

> nor that it runs outside X11,

Is that a real problem, from a Debian point of view?  Aren't we entering
a phase of multiple display management choices anyway, with Wayland
coming along?  I would have thought that direct framebuffer access, with
a complementary window management model, was an equally valid choice as
using either X or Wayland.

Also note that QtMoko supports starting an X server temporarily to run X
clients.

> It duplicates parts of FSO in some ways.

And also oFono.  But there are many examples of similar duplication in
Debian, so is that really a notable problem?  Passing through a phase of
(middleware) duplication can be a practical prequel to converging on a
single solution.

> Uses kernels we can't add to Debian.

Do you mean just because of drivers/changes not being mainlined, or are
there other reasons?

> I have a feeling upstream aren't interested in working on getting it
> into Debian, that may be completely wrong though.

I can't speak for Radek, the main upstream developer, but I'm a small
part of upstream, and my view is that we still have too many functional
issues to worry about to make Debianisation a priority ourselves.  Also
I'm not personally a DD or DM yet.  But I believe that Debianisation
would be a good long term structure for QtMoko; I am certainly not
hostile to that.

Regards,
        Neil