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

Eskil Abrahamsen Blomfeldt eskil.abrahamsen-blomfeldt at digia.com
Fri Jan 11 16:07:12 CET 2013


On 01/11/2013 03:36 PM, Felipe Crochik wrote:
> Are there plans to change this flow? 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 understand ministro plays an important part and donwloads the right 
> version of the libraries for each device and that we would have to 
> duplicate its code with every application but it seems like a very 
> reasonable price to pay if that would actually make the "first 
> install" experience better. Are there any other technical reasons why 
> this approach would not work?

Hi,

We need alternative deployment mechanisms for the use cases that are not 
covered by Ministro, but there are issues with this for deploying 
imports and plugins and Ministro also makes it easier to deploy to 
different devices, as it downloads the correct version of the platform 
plugin for you. I think this is all solvable somehow, but I don't think 
the solution is integrating Ministro in each app, because each app would 
still have to download their own libraries if there's no central 
repository on the device. I think it would be better to make a secondary 
deployment method which allows you to put everything you need into the 
apk so that the app works out of the box and you have full control over 
the Qt libraries it uses and when these are updated. I'm not 100% sure 
what that would require at the moment, though. It could mean building 
statically, or it could mean something else.

So the bottom line: I do think we need support for this, but I think we 
should spend the time to find the right solution, so it's not likely to 
happen for the experimental version of the port we're planning to 
release with Qt 5.1. Since Ministro is well-tested and provides both a 
simple and working way of deploying and updating the libraries, imports 
and plugins we need, and it allows several apps to share the same 
binaries, so you avoid bloating the size of your app (which might a 
problem depending on how large your app is to begin with), I think it's 
a good solution for the first version of the port.

-- Eskil





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