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Ubuntu App Developer Blog: The Next Generation SDK Published Sep 1 2015 via RSS

planetUbuntu

Up until now the basic architecture of the SDK IDE and tools packaging was that we have packaged and distributed the QtCreator IDE and our Ubuntu plugins as separate distro packages which strongly depend on the Qt available in the same release.

Since 14.04 we have been jumping through hoops to provide the very same developer experience from a single development branch of the SDK projects. Just to give a quick picture on what we have available in the last few releases (note that 1.3 UITK is not yet released):

14.04 Trusty	Qt 5.2.1	QtCreator 3.0.1	UI Toolkit 0.1
14.10 Utopic	Qt 5.3.	QtCreator 3.1.1	UI Toolkit 1.1
15.04 Vivid	Qt 5.4.1	QtCreator 3.1.1	UI Toolkit 1.2
15.10 Wily	Qt 5.4.2	QtCreator 3.5.0	UI Toolkit 1.3

Life could have been easier by sticking to one stable Qt and QtCreator and base our SDK on it. Obviously it was not a realistic option as the phone development needed the most recent Qt and our friend Kubuntu required a hot new engine under its hood too. So Qt was quickly moving forward and the SDK followed it. Of course it was all beneficial as new Qt releases brought us bugfixes, new features and improved performance.

But on the way we came to realize that continuously backporting the UITK and the QtCreator plugins to older releases and the LTS was simply not going to be possible. It went fine for some time, but the more API breaks the new Qt and QtCreator releases brought the more problems we had to face. Some people have asked why we don’t backport the latest Qt releases to the LTS or to the stable Ubuntu. As an idea it may sound good, but changing the Qt to 5.4.2 under an application in LTS what was built against 5.2.1 Qt would certainly break that application. So it is simply not cool to mess around with such fundamental bits of a stable and long term supported release.

The only option we had was to decouple the SDK from the archive release of Qt and build it as a standalone package without any external Qt dependencies. That way we could provide the exact same experience and tools to all developers regardless if they are playing safe on Trusty/LTS or enjoy the cutting edge on the daily developed release of Wily.

The idea manifested in a really funny project. The source tree of the project is pretty empty. Only cmake and the debian/rules take care of the job. The builder pulls the latest stable Qt, QtCreator and UITK. Builds and integrates the libdbusmenu-qt and appmenu-qt5 projects and deploys the SDK IDE. The package itself is super skinny. Opposing the old model where QtCreator has pulled most of the Qt modules as dependencies this package contains all it needs and the size of it is impressing 36MB. Cheap. Just the way I like it. Plus this package already contains the 1.3 UITK as our QtCreator plugin (Devices Tab) is using it. So in fact we are just one step from enabling desktop application development on 14.04 LTS with the same UI Toolkit as we use on the commercial phone devices. And that is a super hot idea.

The Ubuntu SDK IDE project lives here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-sdk-ide

If you want to check out how it is done:

$ bzr branch lp:ubuntu-sdk-ide

Since we considered such a big facelift on the SDK I thought why not to make the change much bigger. Some might remember that there was a discussion on the Ubuntu Phone mailing list about the possibility to improve the Kit creation in the IDE. Since then we have been playing with the idea and I think it is now a good time to unleash the static chroots.

The basic idea is that creating the builder chroots runtime is a super slow and fragile process. The bootstrapping of the click chroot already takes a long time and installing the SDK API packages (all the libs and dev packages with headers) into the chroot is also time consuming. So why not to create these root filesystems in advance and provide them as single installable packages.

This is exactly what we have done. The base of the API packages is the Vivid core image. It is small and contains only the absolutely necessary packages, we install the SDK libs, dev packages and development tools on the core image and configure the Overlay PPA too. So the final image is pretty much equivalent with the image on a freshly updated device out there. It means that the developer can build and test against the same API set as it is available on the devices.

These API packages are still huge. Their size is around 500MB, so on a slow connection it still takes ages to download, but still it is way faster than bootstrapping a 1.6GB chroot package by package.

This API packages contain a single tar.gz file and the post install script of the package puts the content of this tar.gz to the right place and wires it in, in the way it should be. Once the package is installed the new Kit will be automatically recognized by the IDE.

One important note on this API package! If you have an armhf 15.04 Kit (click chroot) already on your system when you install this package, then your original Kit will not be removed but simply renamed to backup-[timestamp]-[original name]. So do not worry if you have customized Kits, they are safe.

The Ubuntu SDK API project is only a packaging project with a simple script to take care of the dirty details. The project is hosted here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-sdk-api-15.04

And if you want to see what is in it just do

$ bzr branch lp:ubuntu-sdk-api-15.04  

The release candidate packages are available from the Tools Development PPA of the SDK team: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-sdk-team/+archive/ubuntu/tools-development

How to test these packages?

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-sdk-team/tools-development -y

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-sdk-ide ubuntu-sdk-api-tools

$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-sdk-api-15.04-armhf ubuntu-sdk-api-15.04-i386

After that look for the Ubuntu SDK IDE in the dash.