The Qt promise and what Maemo 5 needs
Thomas Perl argues that Nokia should provide official updates to Qt on Maemo 5 to support their cross-platform development message and vision, despite them being unlikely to release future "PR" updates to Maemo 5 itself: We are stuck with Maemo 5 on the N900. And that is a good thing! Lots of useful apps, a helpful community and a polished OS. Sure, there's room for improvement, and lots of open bugs that should be fixed, but that's another issue (which will ideally be solved by open sourcing closed components with bugs that Nokia isn't interested in fixing anymore and by the Community SSU). This one is about Qt.
Maemo Community "Service Pack" for Qt fixes?
Thomas' blog post was inspired after Ville Vainio suggested the community could take on a small meta-package for a couple of Qt bug fixes; and then encourage Qt application authors to add a dependency on this package: It would make sense to have a single metapackage (community-service-pack, or something to that effect) that we would expect everyone to have installed. Applications that need it could have it as a dependency, instead of enumerating every unbreak-my-platform patch ever developed. The response was not unanimously in favour, but a single meta-package seems likely to bundle the Qt dependencies - and it is difficult to see the harm when its scope is so limited.