Thread: Maemo 6 loosing source compatibility with plain Qt, and Symbian^4
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Mark Wilcox is offline Mark Wilcox
2009-12-15 , 18:17
Posts: 12 | Thanked: 125 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ York UK
#96
Hi,

Thanks for the lengthy response. I don't see this situation as apocalyptic and I'm really glad that both platforms are in open source so we can start doing something about this rather than Nokia dumping a couple of largely incompatible SDKs on us shortly before products ship.

Now, you know that software is developed by people with goals. In theory you can look at a toolkit and conclude that it will take this time for this amount of people to come up with a release. In practice this doesn't work like this.
Yes, I know very well how it works (or doesn't in some cases) having been involved with platforms for most of the major OEMs at some point.

Remember how was life around Qt only 2 years ago. Trolltech was a company in Norway. Symbian was a closed core OS developed by a company in the UK. There was S60 developed in a closed environment by several companies. Maemo was a GTK+ based platform pushed by a small team living basically out of the Nokia mainstream software strategy.
Yes, I know this history very well too, having been in and around Nokia and Symbian, using Maemo regularly, a Forum Nokia Champion and writing a book that included a lot about Qt and the need to follow the Qt tech previews very closely for that. (BTW, my book is about porting to Symbian and a lot of it about porting from Linux-based platforms, so this is a subject very close to my heart. Qt was the holy grail and Nokia have shown it to us and then pulled it just out of reach again.)

Now, at which point and at a which cost would you have been able to create the single team developing the toolkit to make everybody happy? Qt, Symbian and Maemo have different stakeholders with some overlaps. They have slightly different ways of working. The three organizations are going through huge transformations and in the meantime they have roadmaps, releases and products going out to the market. And yet they still have own goals, even if they complement each other and are sometimes common.
Nokia has been through a hugely challenging time, but they've spent about 9 of the last 18 months re-organising internally - it can only be concluded that politics has trumped technical strategy and pragmatism in this process (actually I've seen lots of evidence of that elsewhere in the organisation too - ask about PlatSim vs QEMU internally on the Symbian side for example...). I'm not saying a single team to create the framework was required, just a cross-platform co-operation to define a common API set (doesn't have to be 100% common, just a common core). There would still have been a need for two implementations of this API and some agreements on who does which core bits that are pure Qt code. This suggests that despite significant improvements, Nokia hasn't yet integrated the Qt way into its DNA - it's still a company that puts products first and developer platform second. (Although the Symbian side of the organisation is much more guilty of this than Maemo I have to say!)

Yes, there were many market pressures and some people were probably in a panic but still I find that sad. However, it's crying over spilt milk now. I don't really care why we got here (except that Nokia should take this back for its lessons learned).

What are we going to do about it?

Yes, we can all get more fully involved in the conversation when some alpha SDKs are available. But the information we have already is enough to throw up red flags. I hope that you also take this back internally and get people to review things.

However, there are specific things in this thread that I wouldn't want to see dismissed. For example QApplication works across so many platforms, and you can build and test code on any one of them. Why then must I build a DuiApplication? I'm not going to be at all surprised if the Symbian^4 UI framework does something similar. If there is platform specific initialisation to be done, why can't it be pushed into the private implementation of QApplication for each platform? Just because KDE does it too doesn't make it right. ;-)

Oh, and don't worry, I'm only complaining at Maemo first because they've released their code first. I'll be giving the Symbian guys even more of a hard time when I get the chance.
 

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