[Development] Android port - Why do we need Ministro?

[Laszlo Papp]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 2:36 PM, Felipe Crochik <qt-project at b2-4ac.com>wrote:

> I have to assume this subject has been discussed before in other lists but
> since the android port it is a "hot topic" on this list right now I thought
> it was worth starting again.


I think it is a good idea to reiterate again because many people here have
not seen this topic before on this list, I assume.


> I deployed a test application using the necessitas project and while I was
> impressed on how nice the development experience was (minor a few crashes
> on qt creator) I found out that most users that tried to install my
> application had a very hard time.
>
> The current flow requires a user to:
> 1) download your "app" from the store;
> 2) When executing it for the first time (assuming that the user has never
> installed another application based on necessitas) the application will
> redirect the user to the google play store to download ministro (what I
> found most users will not understand);
> 3) After installing ministro the user will need to know to try to execute
> the "app" again;
> 4) On executing the app for the second time the qt libraries will be
> downloaded.
> 5) enjoy the app!
>
> Are there plans to change this flow?
>

We have not used this workflow for the KDE Harmattan project, but I can
understand the reasoning behind as well. We had put the libraries into each
application (self-contained or "bundled"), but that resulted the same
(sometimes huge) libraries shipped several times. This could mean dozen and
even more occurrences for Qt applications.


> I have to assume there were good reasons to do like this but without
> actually looking into the code it seems that would make more sense to
> combine the ministro code with the java wrapper generated for each
> application, no?
>

I am not familiar with the java wrapper et al. Could you please summarize
the steps from user perspective you are thinking of?

My opinion is now that the two ways (self-containment and explicite
downloading) could coexist depending on the use case. I would not use
ministro for a small application where I could boundle a small library up.

Laszlo
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