Hi David!
[Bitwiseworks]
They still need a lot of donations to pay their developer to finish this QT5/Browser project (see the donation meter at the bottom of their homepage - 0.5% of the estimated amount is from me, sadly I couldn't afford more).
Five percent is good.
I thought I was doing good [...]
Five percent would be REALLY good (that's about a month of development time). It's five per mil, a tenth of that, so you are doing good, even when you had to slow down in the last few months. Sorry about your truck and the companys plant ...
It really wish, that a lot more people would donate regularly (or could spend a larger sum once), because Dmitriy needs to be paid for his full time development job. We can't afford him to have to look for another job to finance his family, as that would drastically reduce the amount of time he could spend on developing for us.
And with the new GCC 9.2 port including many things in the toolchain, porting (or maintaining) other tools and applications has become a lot easier, because now it's "only" needed to fiddle with OS/2-specific things instead of having to do a lot of hacks to get the newer sources to compile at all with the old version 4 of GCC.
A compiler is not an end user tool like OpenOffice, but it's essential for providing such applications - you can buy a sponsor unit dedicated for GCC if you want.
And a library like QT5 is also not an end user tool, but a lot of applications are built using it, so it's essential, too.
I'll go to miss SeaMonkey in the future, but even on other platforms it massivly lags behind FireFox, as there are so many breaking changes coming in ever faster release cycles, without huge manpower it simply wasn't feasible to try to keep somehow up with them.
To be able to provide a new browser for OS/2 without so much hassle, a webkit/chromium based browser like falcon became the new target. As this required a current QT5 (we had QT4) and also could provide us with a lot more current end user software, the port was started.
For an IT project it is good in time, but there were several other things to do beside just porting QT5 itself, like porting current versions of GCC and other tools, as they are prerequisites for being able to finish QT5. More time means more money is needed, best in form of a steady flow.
So I absoluetly agree with Martins #1: Support Arca Noae and Bitwise works.
With the upcoming USB 3 support (and later UEFI) from Arca Noae, a lot more modern hardware can be used, so there will be enough stuff to add or update Martins #2: More reports and list of supported hardware.
I like #6: More Instructions, articles on how to build a development environment.
It's probably never been easier to turn an end user system into a development machine.
Install all those development stuff via ANPM onto your PC.
Do some magic ...
And with luck, it is just a git clone and a make ...
That would be a dream and #9: Porting open source software to OS/2-ArcaOS.
Sandra-Asja