On 2/12/14, 10:53 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Il giorno mercoledì 12 febbraio 2014 23:43:10 UTC+11, Julien Wajsberg ha
scritto:
It's difficult to help you here, maybe first try to ask the guy if it
works well for him ?
This wasn't my point, maybe I wasn't clear enough. My point is: is 1.3 broken
for everyone (or at least someone else) on the Alcatel, or is it just that
build available on that website? Do we have to start looking for a bug on FFOS,
or is it just a build problem?
Iacopo
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Hello Iacopo,
Glad you are excited about FxOS and trying to get the newer versions up
and running. Sorry to hear you are having issues.
Carlos Sanchez has done a great job, swimming against the current,
trying to get any kind of builds out there. However, his builds are hit
and miss. I am running one of his 1.2 builds for a month and it is
great. Like you, I have had problems with his 1.3 and 1.4 builds so I am
not surprised to hear you have issues with more recent releases.
The proximate problem is that no one can effectively build the kernel
for the Alcatel OneTouch Fire. Alcatel, in line with its GPL
responsibilities, has posted a dump on Sourceforge.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/alcatel/files
/ONE_TOUCH_FIRE_4012_20130628.tar.xz/download
However, I have not yet struggled and figured out how to build that. I
think Carlos may have or he may have fixed the B2G project, not sure how
he is making his builds.
The root problem is that whomever provided me and you with our devices
is violating the General Public License: they are distributing software
they do not own (the Linux Kernel) without following the legal
responsibilities under which they obtained the right to distribute that
software (to give us the source). In my case, Movistar Uruguay legally
must provide me with the full source code of the actual kernel which is
running on my phone (and presumably, though perhaps not explicitly
legally, a pointer for how to build that source dump). (The distributors
might also have similar responsibilities under the MPL but I have not
yet read that license closely enough to see.)
The correlated problem is that Mozilla does not feel or take on any
responsibility in this situation. The Mozilla Foundation does not (yet)
see that the B2G project, beyond being a build helper for the assembling
and building the FxOS source, ought to be the tool through which the
telephony partners comply with the GPL. That is, rather than every
partner dumping random source code in random location, they could all
point to the B2G project at some specific set of revisions to comply
with the law. (If you analyze the Android Project, you can see that this
is part of the reason the AOSP is so carefully and well done.)
Additionally, the Mozilla developers do not see themselves as having any
responsibility towards the community for released devices; Mozilla is
working for itself on the future OS and with partners on new devices.
That view nicely avoids Mozilla feeling any responsibility towards
providing ongoing support for released devices, either directly or
indirectly by improving B2G to help their partners provide that ongoing
support. So we are on our own for slogging through this mess and will
get only minimal, sporadic support from this list. For instance, it is
not clear what would work or break if we ran the FxOS 1.4 gecko and gaia
on the kernel released for the original 1.1 device; Mozilla does not
provide that kind of gonk version change documentation.
So that's the problem we face as I understand it; fixing it is harder.
A primary need, from my point of view, is taking the B2G project from
the current, fragile, undocumented, sloppily structured system to an
industrially robust, modular, fully documented build tool for all users:
mozilla developers, telephony partners, community hackers, and web app
developers who just need a latest build. I spent December working on a
bash script infrastructure for such a project and then got bogged down
for the nth time in the mess and stopped, discouraged. I gave up when I
discovered that my manifest was downloading the gigabytes of Linux
kernel and associated libraries but was then silently skipping the
compile. Eventually, I'll work up the energy again to delve into the
mess and maybe make progress; however, I suspect that I will never
actually successfully build FxOS for the OneTouch Fire. It's too bad
because it is a decent developer phone.
A secondary need will be to resolve the GPL violations. My current plan
on that is to write the board of the Mozilla Foundation asking for
advice. I presume they would rather resolve this themselves through back
channels in a friendly supportive process since keeping the telephony
partners happy is critical to the ongoing success of FxOS. However, I
also suspect they will fail to assign anyone to work on it or fail to
sustain the effort necessary to make it happen. (After all, technically
this is not their problem.) That will mean we are left to work through
other means, probably contacting the Linux Foundation, FSF, and SFLC,
and possibly eventually end up in court. If I have the energy for it, I
guess that I'll learn how the court system works in this country. (A
minor hiccup in this plan is that Mozilla does not actually offer any
contact point for the Board of Directors that I have yet been able to
find, a lovely testimony to how little they look at themselves from the
point of view of the outside community.)
The long and short of this is that you should probably give up unless
you have lots and lots of energy for a long term struggle. Stick with
1.2 which does allow you to debug through the App Manager (a massive
advantage) and is somewhat functional as an OS.
When you really need something newer, it will be much less stress for
you simply to buy a new device. Ideally, it would be from someone
dedicated enough to free software that they at least have a full build
using the B2G system or some equivalent and perhaps even make some
comittment to ongoing support. The new Geeksphone looks promising so we
will have to see how well the company backs it up. It has got an Intel
chip inside which makes everything more iffy though Intel are really
committed to try to make things work on phones which might be a plus.
In the mean time, I would actually encourage you to not file any
bugs---it will end up being stressful without helping anyone. If you
have a 1.2 device and the developers have all moved on to 1.4, we really
can't help each other. At best, they might eventually tell you 'works on
newer xxx' which will be of no utility to you and you won't be able to
know if they even understood your bug to begin with and if it has indeed
been fixed. So save yourself the effort and grief, and save the work on
bug triage. Bugs are now features.
How do we keep a positive attitude through all this? We want FxOS to be
great and we want to write apps and we might want to hack the OS itself,
certainly we want newer builds that fix the bugs we run into.
There are bright spots in the current situation.
The OS itself and its apps are improving to the point that buying a
future device will be a different experience: getting stuck on a 1.4
device will be much less painful than being stuck on a 1.0, 1.1, or 1.2
device.
The community keeps generating great web sites or resources like the
hacking guide you have seen, Carlos' images, and a guide I just found
trying to give the low down on FxOS styled web apps to get past the rats
nest of documents and sites created by Mozilla.
The Web API are well documented on MDN and Gecko is very solid, which
makes the HTML5 and Javascript side of things pleasant to work on. The
developers tools in the current Firefox browser are making things much
easier.
So, we may be last on the list of priorities for the project, but we can
help each other get past the next year. By then, perhaps Mozilla will
start to actually care about these issues or these issues will fade in
importance.
cheers,
~adrian
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