Alpha4 release status

[BogDan Vatra]

Hello folks,

  Unfortunately I have more bad news regarding alpha4 release, I
manage to fix the OpenGL problem, but I discover another one. The
startup of all applications has slowdown a lot (2-4 times), the
problem is the difference between alpha3 and alpha4 is huge (1000+
patches). Alpha3 is based on Qt 4.8.0-rc and alpha4 is based on Qt
4.8.2, to be sure the problem is not caused by me, I have to
cherry-pick all my changes and put them on top of alpha3, them, if is
not my fault the pain begins, I'll have to merge Qt 4.8.0, check, then
Qt 4.8.1, then Qt 4.8.2. This is going to be a very slow and painful
process which will take days (even weeks) so, I don't believe alpha4
will be out before QCS, unless a miracle happens and I'll found the
issue in the next days.

Sorry for the bad news ...

Cheers,
BogDan.


2012/6/4 BogDan <taipanromania at gmail.com>:
> This http://files.kde.org/necessitas/installer/MinistroActivity.apk is
> the link to Ministro.
>
> BogDan.
>
>
> On Jun 4, 2:02 pm, BogDan Vatra <taipanroma... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>>  As you may know the alpha4 release is approaching, the plan is to
>> have it ready before Qt Contributors Summit. It is almost completed, I
>> need a few days to polish the style plugin and Minitro and another few
>> to add support for context menus.
>>
>>   A few days ago I pushed to Minnistro's "unstable" repository the
>> current alpha4 branch in order to check if the existing released apps
>> are still working. Even we've made some heavy changes and even if I
>> warn you that it may break the compatibility with older versions, I
>> wanted alpha4 to be backward compatible with alpha3, it is also a test
>> for Necessitas developers to see if we can keep our promise: to ship
>> releases which are backward compatible!
>>
>> If you want to try it yourself please follow the next two steps:
>>  - uninstall official Ministro and use this onehttp://files.kde.org/necessitas/MinistroActivity.apk.
>>  - install and run Ministro configuration tool (from market) and
>> choose unstable repository.
>>
>> Don't forget that Ministro is not stable and it may crash/hang, if you
>> encounter any problems please reply on this thread.
>>
>> Shorty after the repository was ready, I tried a few apps from market
>> and two major problems pop up:
>> - The first problem was related to some missing symbols and was caused
>> by compilation/linking flags.
>> - The second one is related to OpenGL and it seems to be caused by the
>> merge with Qt 4.8.2.
>>
>> 1. Missing symbols problem: Android comes with almost no support for
>> C++, so to compile Qt we used (static) gnu-libstdc++.
>> Then I discovered that this was a big mistake (for more information
>> check Android NDK docs/CPLUSPLUS-SUPPORT.html "II.3. Static runtimes:"
>> section).
>> We can not use link libstdc++ statically if we are using more than one
>> shared libraries in a project. To fix this problem I had two choices:
>>  - to use the shared libstdc++ implementation and to change all the
>> scripts in order to add it to ministro (1.2M).
>>  - to "embed" the whole library into QtCore library (it adds and extra
>> 600K) but this change requires no additional changes.
>>
>> I choose the second one [1],[2] because it was safe and easy and
>> mostly because it didn't needed any other changes.
>> If anybody has something against this change speak now or forever hold
>> your peace !
>>
>> I'd like to add exceptions and RTTI by default, if the size and speed
>> will not be affected.
>>
>> 2. OpenGL problem: After I merged alpha4 branch with upstream Qt
>> 4.8.2, most of the OpenGL apps are not working anymore, I tried to fix
>> it my self but I end up with a very ugly workarround. It seems that
>> "boolQGLContext::areSharing(constQGLContext*context1,constQGLContext*contex t2)"
>> always returns false. I tried to trace the problem but with no luck
>> and I end up adding a super dirty workarround: on android,
>> "QGLContext::areSharing", will always returns true. I really don't
>> like it, so until we'll figure out what is wrong the release process
>> will stop ...
>>
>> Any help will on this matter be very appreciated !
>>
>> I've spot another minor problem with old assets support it was caused
>> by "QString QDeclarativeTypeLoader::absoluteFilePath(const QString
>> &path)" I fixed it locally but I didn't had time to push the fix to
>> Minsitro's repository yet.
>> I'll keep you post with the progress and with any Ministro repository changes.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> BogDan.
>>
>> [1]http://quickgit.kde.org/index.php?p=android-qt.git&a=commit&h=8c4c862...
>> [2]http://quickgit.kde.org/index.php?p=android-qt.git&a=commit&h=abe85f4...