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

[Felipe Crochik]

Mainly my suggestion is to avoid the step of having to have ministro
installed. I appreciate that including the qt libraries with every app is
not the best approach (especially if we need different sets for the
different android versions/devices).

I would like for each application to include some shared code that would
download, only if necessary, the "best" qt libraries to a shared location
on the device. I assume that is exactly what ministro does but as it is the
user MUST have "the ministro applicaiton" installed before any other
application (based on necessitas) can request the qt libraries.

In a sense I want to include ministro with every application - not the qt
libraries. And in the process make it as seamless as possible.

I guess possible reasons for the design we have now are (just a wild guess
since I didn't look into the code and was not involved with its development)
1) because this way ministro can be improved to include more libraries
regardless of the applications that depend on it; or
2) because there is some challenge with applications sharing libraries and
we need a "broker".

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 9:51 AM, Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> wrote:

> 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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