Not that long ago I blogged about what I think dogfooding means: http://dbaron.org/log/20121119-dogfood . One of the key points I made there is that the critical audience for dogfooding is the people doing development of the software.
As somebody a somewhat involved with development of B2G (in my role as a Gecko developer), though far from the center of the team, I'm finding that the biggest obstacle to my own dogfooding is this: I'm frequently reflashing my phone and wiping all the settings off of it, which prevents me from actually building up any of the configuration (bookmarks, cookies, home screen icons, etc.) that would allow me to use the phone effectively. I'm reflashing the phone either because I want to get a newer build, or because I actually need to test patches that I'm developing on my phone. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/Installing_on_a_mobile_device describes a way to flash just gecko and gaia without reflashing the whole phone, e.g., by using: ./flash.sh gecko ./flash.sh gaia instead of wiping out everything with: ./flash.sh But my experience trying these has been that it usually leaves me with a phone that won't even boot, and that can be fixed only with a full ./flash.sh. It's not clear to me whether I'm doing something wrong (in which case I'd love to see improved documentation), whether things were broken at times but then fixed (in which case I'd have loved to see announcements to this list), or whether this is the expected behavior. Either way, I think it's important to the project (for the reasons I described in the dogfooding post above) for this to be fixed. I think it's important that developers be able to really use their phones, and I think an important part of that is being able to accumulate the sort of configuration that a normal user would have. -David -- 𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂 𝄢 Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂 _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
