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.

One more comments wrt to crashes for 2.0.x: you should compile without  
threads, that would make things much more stable.
./autogen.sh --disable-threads
Bye
Manu