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

[Eskil Abrahamsen Blomfeldt]

On 01/11/2013 04:23 PM, Felipe Crochik wrote:
> With my very limited experience on the subject I have to say that "the 
> current flow" is probably good enough for "controlled distribution" 
> but pretty bad for mass market apps.
>
> Having the application download the libraries after "being downloaded" 
> is bad enough for the average user but figuring out the "installing 
> ministro step" requires a level of commitment that I think very few 
> "average/casual" users will show for a "random application they found 
> in the store".
>
> Why do you think incorporating ministro code into each application is 
> bad? Unless there is some technical limitation to install shared 
> libraries this way the only drawback I can imagine is that we will 
> need to update applications that depend on it with any "improvement on 
> it" is made because of new devices - what is a pretty reasonable 
> problem to work around.
>
> Note that I am only talking about "the Qt shared libraries" - not any 
> other third party libraries.

This suggestion is definitely something we'll investigate. I haven't 
looked into the Ministro code yet, so I don't know if it's technically 
possible, but as far as I've understood from previous discussions, there 
are limits to where apps can write on the device and there are limits to 
where they can load libraries, which makes the app serving as a central 
repository of libraries necessary. But it's something we need to 
investigate further, and for the moment we don't have the resources to 
take this on for Qt 5.1, where our main priority will be to get the Qt 5 
port on par with the Qt 4 version of Necessitas. When get that far, we 
can start looking into alternative solutions for deploying Qt apps which 
does not require the extra "install ministro" step when a user launches 
a Qt app for the first time on a device.

If integrating Ministro in the app is an option, then I agree it might 
better than depending on an external app, but I still think we would 
need a second solution which allows you to bundle the libraries with 
your app.

-- Eskil


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