[Qt-interest] Qt on Android

[Thiago Macieira]

Em Terça-feira 27 Outubro 2009, às 16:29:24, você escreveu:
> Thanks all for chiming in on this.
> 
> In summary I have a couple questions.
> 
> Given that Android has the NDK, how hard would it be to port Qt to
> Android? From reading their docs I doubt it has framebuffer support and
> doesn't have X, and probably doesn't have all the libraries needed (but it
> does come with libc, libm, libz, and a cross-compiler).
> 
> Is it likely that anyone would do a port? It sounds like from Thiago's
> post that at least he sees it would be benefitial for Nokia. Whether other
> people in Nokia see it that way I don't know. If Nokia is not opposed to
> having a port out there, is it possible a port will be done at some point?
> Why aren't they pursuing it now, is it because Android doesn't have enough
> market share?
> 
> Could someone comment on whether the following post is based upon
> something I don't see. While it is encouraging that the 1.6 NDK opens up
> more, you still need to use the VM for the actual graphics, which seems to
> me as the hard part.?
> 
> http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4070

I can't comment on whether Nokia is going to port to Android or not. I frankly 
don't know. The official answer is that nothing has been decided, one way or 
another.

My opinion is my own, clearly. Besides, even if my opinion were shared among 
many, we'd still need a business reason to do the port. It takes a lot of 
investment to port, then to maintain.

What's more, like you said, I have no clue if the NDK is enough. Reading some 
reviews indicates that the 1.6 version does allow native code UI applications, 
whereas other reviews indicate the opposite. It seems that you still can't get 
a video surface to paint on from native code -- you have to go through the 
Java API.

But, if Nokia doesn't do it, there's nothing stopping others from doing so. 
That post above is an example of such. Here are a couple of other Qt 
independent ports:
- http://qt.gitorious.org/+qt-iphone/qt/qt-iphone-clone
- http://svn.netlabs.org/qt4 (Qt for OS/2)
- 
http://joomla.iscomputeron.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1136&Itemid=2 
(Qt for Haiku)

Those communities should work together with us to keep their codebase in sync 
with ours. With the open Git repository, it should be easy to merge in 
changes, run the tests, etc. But more than that, it's about telling us where 
they need deep modifications into Qt, so we can work with them and avoid 
behaviour differences.

Given enough work, we could even merge in the port to our tree, as an 
unsupported platform.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  Senior Product Manager - Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks
      PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
      E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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