[SailfishDevel] 2 virtualbox

[David Greaves]

On 26/02/13 22:28, Nicola De Filippo wrote:
> Hi,
> today i have spoken with a my friend (mobile and Qt developer, symbian,
> meego, iphone, adroid). he told me: "why to use 2 virtualbox? i don't like
> it". I said with virtualbox you haven't files in your filesystem, you can to
> have different sdk for different device, you have greater freedom. Is my
> answer correct? Are there other reasons?
>      BR
>        Niqt

>From the FAQ: https://sailfishos.org/develop-faq.html

Why are you using virtual machines?

Using virtual machines allows us to efficiently deliver a consistent build
environment to a wide range of platforms. Whilst there is a small performance
penalty, we think this is a worthwhile tradeoff for the benefits it gives us
all. We have further optimisations planned.

We can expand on that too.

Sailfish is for organisations as well as individal developers; and in that
situation it's very useful that the build engine is running the exact same code
on all developer desktops as it is in the central QA build system. By having the
build engine as a VM we can ensure this on any platform - Linux, Mac and Windows.

Even more - if you want, you have the power of the entire Mer Platform SDK
inside the VM. That allows a host of additional services which are useful to
different types of customer.

So that's the build engine - but of course we have the emulator too - and that's
actually the SailfishOS running in the other virtual machine - so you have an
environment which is as close as possible to a device.

You are also correct that virtual machines are a good way to isolate the tools
from your host and that helps us provide more effective support.

You could have multiple SDKs but we've designed the SailfishOS SDK to support
multiple targets from day 1 - the Control Centre would let you install new
targets for things like SailfishOS TV running on the MIPS architecture (if that
were ever made). Both ways are possible.

David