Re: Making balsa suitable for small devices

[manu <eallaud yahoo fr>]

On 08.06.2004 11:20:45, Wookey wrote:
> Hi people, I'm an arm-linux, Debian and Embedded Debian developer and
> I'm
> involved in a project that wants to use balsa on a small web-pad type
> device
> (but with a real keyboard).
>
> Our biggest constraint is flash size - we've got an awful lot of  
> stuff
> to
> shoehorn into ~60Mb. Balsa seems to have a pretty reasonsble  
> footprint
> for
> it's functionality (better than sylpheed which is the main  
> competition
> :-)
> ), however it's still too fat.
>
> What I'm hoping I can get from you guys is some clues on what options
> there
> are for minimising the footprint, and help with making it good to use
> on a
> touchscreen (only one sort of click, no tooltips, big icons).
>
> Presumably there is room for some shinkage by missing out libraries  
> or
> functionality or languages?  What tradeoffs are there are to be made
> (both
> easily or with some development). Does it have a --without-gnome
> option
> (like gnumeric) to remove a load of gconf and bonobo stuff for
> example?
>
> The things we definately need to keep are HTML mail (spit - I hate
> it!) and
> POP and IMAP, and decent fonts. Much of the rest is up for debate.
>
> There will definately need to be UI changes for the touchscreen use -
> presumably you'd be happy for these to come back into the mainstream
> for
> others that need this? We're keen for our changes to go upstream
> wherever
> possible as it makes our lives easier, but there may be some things  
> we
> want
> to do which aren't really what the balsa team is looking for. I need
> guidance on that.
>
> One problem we have right now is that it's a bit flaky - it crashes
> far too
> opften (we're testing with the Debian build 2.0.17-2) and it's  
> running
> on an
> arm-based device. I don't know how much testing has been done on arm.
> Is
> flakiness expected?
>
> And finally there is a possiblity of some paid work making said
> changes.
> Anyone who is in a position to work on it _this month_ should tell me
> what
> they can do, when they can do it, and how much cash they'd need to
> concentrate their minds (off list is probably best). You would have  
> to
> sign
> an NDA to keep you quiet about the details for the next 3 months or  
> so
> (These corporate clients don't like anyone to know what they are  
> doing
> :-)
>
> No promises at this stage, but we have a lot to do in s short time  
> and
> using
> the relevant experts whilst giving something back to the community is
> the
> best way in our experience.
>
> Sorry to come barging in here in such a businesslike fashion - I hope
> I can
> contribute something useful to the project one way or another.

Two things are for sure: 2.0.x does not use neither gconf nor bonobo. I  
am not sure you would need filters for your settings (I have no idea  
how much room you can save without them, but it is certainly  
interesting). Also pref management could be shrunk a lot putting  
reasonable default (and you don't need the flexibility to choose colors  
for messages...).
On the other balsa 2.1.x is much better wrt to memory footprint but  
this makes a difference if you have big mailboxes; the problem is that  
it is still a bit buggy (though it improves really fast) and it  
certainly has been less tested that 2.0. AFAICT it would not be a  
problem to get rid of bonobo also, and it does not use gconf.
For any version you must decide if you want gpg support (this means  
more libs dependancy).
Hope others can correct my claims and add other comments.
Bye
Manu