An audacious goal for SUSE Hack Week 10

I have set myself an audacious goal for the tenth SUSE Hack Week: Create a complete collection of all Qt-based libraries which exist.

There are many places where you can find Qt-based libraries. Qt itself already comes with a number of modules. KDE has created a rich set of libraries with additional functionality on top of that, and you can find a lot of other third party libraries on sites like Gitorious, GitHub, Google Code, and more.

Now getting an overview and access to all the Qt library goodness, which is out there, is not particularly easy. To solve that we started Inqlude as a project to create an archive of all available Qt libraries back then at one of the Randa meetings. I worked on it some more at Hack Week 7, and continued to spend a little bit of time here and there. We have reached a state now, where it starts to become useful, and so I thought Hack Week 10 is a great opportunity to fill in the missing bits and pieces, and make it ready for prime time.

We have the web site and a documented format for library meta data. We also have tooling to process the meta data, e.g. for updating the data on new releases or to retrieve packages of libraries for installation. The web site also gets generated with these tools.

One thing which is lacking a bit, is the packaging of libraries, and the integration of the tools with the native package management systems on various platforms. With the help of the Open Build Service the packaging part should be solvable. For the integration on different platforms help of users of these platforms would be greatly appreciated. There is some support for openSUSE, but for other Linux flavors, or non-Linux systems, there is still some work to do.

The other thing is the coverage of the archive. It already has quite a list of libraries, but there are more out there, and I really would like to see it to be as complete as possible. All libraries, which reasonably can be considered useful to developers using Qt, should be on Inqlude. So I'm looking for third party Qt libraries now.

I'll be on the Qt Dev Days in Berlin the next two days, and hope that I can use this opportunity to get some more input and pointers to libraries, we haven't covered yet. If you are there as well and have hints, please talk to me. I'll also give a lightning talk about the current state of Inqlude, so you can learn about where we are first hand.

So this is my project for Hack Week 10. You'll find some more details and updates on the progress on the Hack Week project page. If you want to join the project, don't hesitate to add yourself there and contact me]. We'll use the inqlude mailing list to coordinate work as needed.