[bt-devel] Porting BibleTime to Windows -- trying to build a developer community

[Martin Gruner]

Perhaps this is a good time to introduce some thoughts that Joachim and I had 
together when we thought about the future of BibleTime.

We are just about to release version 1.5, which will be the best release of 
BibleTime ever, because we (mainly Joachim) put a lot of work into bugfixing 
and now do have people who systematically test BibleTime and give us QA-style 
feedback.

It has been mentioned that QT4 will be free for Windows. We therefore decided 
to try and port the existing codebase to QT, making it more cross-platform, 
and release the port as 1.6 without adding new major features. Many technical 
details are unclear yet, but we know that we will use KHTML for rendering, 
and will have to include a few KDE classes in our sources for the port. Later 
we can try to substitue them with own code, if possible. For now, the easiest 
way seems to be development on Linux, and using MinGW for cross-compiling to 
create Windows binaries. The main advantage of this plan is that all the work 
that has gone into BibleTime so far can be kept and extended, so that Windows 
users can immediately benefit from it.

For BibleTime 2.0 we are considering a major restructuring/rewrite, but that 
will only be after a port and after more discussion.

Is anybody interested in this plan? We are tired of doing 1/2 man development 
and would like to create a community of developers who can share the work / 
responsibilities. This is still the early planning phase, so if you are 
interested, please speak up.

Blessings,

Martin