The future of S60, branches and contributions

Many people have expressed some confusion over the the S60 port of Qt and where to find the relevant branches, so I thought I'd give a little update on where things are happening:

When the port was still young, it lived in the qt-s60 repository on gitorious. Here, both the master branch and feature branches coexisted happily. This however changed when the S60 port was merged back into the 4.6 branch of Qt. After this the master branch in the qt-s60 repository became abandoned.

Since this branch will not be used for development anymore, I deleted it today. This does not mean that the repository is dead though. The Qt for S60 developers still use the repository to develop feature branches, and we will continue doing this in the near future. When they are done, they will be merged back to a branch in the Qt repository (like 4.6, 4.7 or master). So unless you want to track a specific feature branch of interest to you, all the relevant S60 development happens in qt/master.

So what about contributions? After the merge of the S60 port, the rule is simple: Submit all merge requests to the Qt repository, even if the request is based on code found only in the qt-s60 repository. This is easier for you (one single place to submit to) and for us (one single place to monitor).

A couple of other notes on contributions related to S60 code:

• Be careful when you deal with code that can throw a Symbian leave. These have to be wrapped in special conversion macros. See this page for more information: Symbian exceptions safety.
• Coding style. Traditionally Symbian has had its own coding style with a different indentation and naming scheme. This style does not apply to S60 code used in the Qt library; We still use the same style that we always have! If you need a cheat sheet to the Qt coding style, look here: Qt Coding Style. You might also want to read the Qt Coding Conventions. Update: If you are using Carbide, you can download the Qt_Code_Style.xml template. To add it, just go to Window > Preferences... > C/C++ > Code Style and import the file you just downloaded.
• There are still problems when compiling Qt for hardware using GCCE. The emulator should work fine though. We hope to get this fixed in the future.
• The rest of the contribution process should be explained in the Qt Contribution Guide.
• Update: The win32-mwc mkspec that was used in earlier releases has been deprecated and is not supported anymore. You need to use either Microsoft Visual Studio or MinGW and use "-platform win32-msvc2008" or "-platform win32-g++", respectively.