[Marble-devel] Marble Maps on SailfishOS, roadmap of Marble Maps?

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi,

as mentioned on #marble before, I have started to look into getting Marble 
Maps to run on SailfishOS, natively, so not as Android app (that works, boring 
;) ).
And I can report there is already an early alpha version now starting on my 
Jolla phone :) 

Code once, run everywhere!
Well, sadly also not the case with Marble Maps: current SailfishOS 2.0 is only 
at Qt 5.2.1 and then without QtQuick Controls.
So current QML code of Marble Maps does not work on this platform. Somewhere 
it was hinted (GCompris has the same problem here) one could simply build an 
own version of QtQuick Controls and somehow use that. But that smelled like 
lots of work and troubles, so I told myself that proper platform integration 
is important anyway, which also means using native QtQuick components 
(Silica). And so I forked src/apps/marble-maps into src/apps/marble-maps-
sailfishos and started to do minimal changes there to quickly reach the state 
where the app starts. Which it does now, both emulator and device. And no code 
changes needed outside of the app itself, libs and plugin build fine out of 
the box (just had to lower minimal cmake version to 2.8.11.2). Yay for clean 
and conservative code here.

Right now I am busy restoring the complete functionality the (normal) Marble 
Maps app has, seeing how native UI would be used for that.
Which brings me to this question:

QUESTION:
What is the roadmap with Marble Maps? Especially, what features are planned 
for the future? And when will releases happen, will they be done in sync with 
normal Marble releases?

I would like to keep the SailfishOS-fork of Marble Maps in sync feature-wise 
with the normal Marble Maps (perhaps one day, when QtQuick Controls are a 
thing everywhere, the fork could be even undone). And also sync releases. 
Which means, I hope to get Marble Maps/SFOS releaseable in time for KA 15.12 
(3 weeks left :) ).

Find first RPMs on 
https://build.merproject.org/package/show/home:kossebau:sailfishos:devel:apps/marble 
and the code in branch sfos in my clone 
git at git.kde.org:clones/marble/kossebau/marble.git

Doing the work for now in the clone to have a playground to go wild, but 
should move things over soon to the normal Marble repo patch-by-patch.

QUESTION:
Currently also on build for Android all data and plugins are installed. Even 
for Moon. Marble Maps going to be used by the Chinese on their lunar mission? 
:)
With Marble Maps only needing support for anything shown with vectorosm and 
mercator display, what is the list of plugins and data which are needed by 
Marble Maps? Would help to cut the size of the package down.
And could libastro only link optionally to libmarblewidget? In pure map mode 
stars are not needed, right? (though might change with 2 1/2 D views in some 
future :) )

Cheers
Friedrich