[Development] Proposal: New list of Qt 5 reference / Tier 1 platforms

[Rutledge Shawn]

On 7 Nov 2012, at 1:26 PM, Laszlo Papp wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Kate Alhola <kate.alhola at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are no longer ANY mobile platform among Tier-1 platforms at all. "linux-arm7-gcc-wayland Linux, ARM7, Wayland. To be specified in more detail" can be MeeGo/SailFish but that's very little for us, mobile developers. Why there is not even Android even it is leading mobile platform and Qt works fine on it.  To have even some degree of reasonable cross platform story, least Android and iOS should be there.
> 
> Qt for mobile is not dead after Nokia but I rather say that it is only cross platform mobile toolkit. Html5 is only .
> 
> I have always been surprised why there has no been more work done on the CI front towards the very common ARM platform. I had to catch common ARM issues on Harmattan and elsewhere (not only mobile phone material) that pretty much came up for all the cases. Such things would have been really nice to be caught by CI.

Well it's so uncommon to do builds right on the ARM platform, and maybe our CI is not currently set up to cross-compile on one platform and run tests on another?  But it's probably possible to do with a few Raspberry Pi's or some sort of ARM-based blade server, as long as it has enough storage and RAM and ethernet, just like the other platforms.  Then install one of the more complete ARM distros like Debian or Arch that actually has a compiler, and icecream.  But it might still slow down the overall CI process unless there are enough of them to run in parallel.

In general I think we could have some more machines which work more like the doc bot and the sanity bot, checking patches and providing feedback without blocking integration.  ARM and PowerPC and minority OSes.