Re: Making balsa suitable for small devices

[Pawel Salek <pawsa theochem kth se>]

On 06/08/2004 07:20:45 PM, 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).

Very nice!

>  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?

Currently not but a patch to HEAD branch would be most welcome. The  
easiest dependency to remove is printing. Spell-checking should be  
simple, too: few #ifdefs (this actually has been requested several time  
in the past when pspell was not particularly stable). Removing the  
dependency on GNOME libs is more complicated because of the menus. It  
is possible to use GTK2 only menus but it requires some work and I  
never quite understood how to handle their i18n - but that's not an  
issue for you, I understand. I do not know how you are going to handle  
mail submission but using libesmtp variant is probably optimal in your  
case.

> 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?

I think so!

> 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?

I am aware of some POP3-related problems in HEAD, otherwise it was rock  
solid for me on x86.

Pawel