+1 and totally keen to help wherever I can. A related question, more for developer/power users: if developers had root access on their phones, could they just update Gecko and Gaia and expect this to work (most of the time anyways, I assume there would be bugs, dependent on what the underlying build was)? The follow-up question being: should we focus on providing a standard way for users to root their devices (or equivalent), in order to support advanced (developer) users who just want the latest build, and can live with a less stable build?
I think your approach is better, I am just curious if this should work. On 15 Apr 2014, at 3:58 pm, Fabrice Desré <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > The situation with updates on b2g is far from being ideal. On one side, > phone manufacturers have little incentive to ship updates for a long > time. On the other side, users legitimately expect to be able to get the > latest version of the OS for as long as their phone works. I think a > reasonable target is to support devices for 2 years. > > Since there's no hope that we will get partners to provide updates for > so long, I've been thinking about what we could do to help users. > > One piece is to provide an *easy* way to change the update channel. > Fortunately that's actually simple: we can just use a web activity that > will be provided by the settings or system app, and then do the usual > setting -> gecko pref mapping. That would let any 3rd party or mozilla > provide gecko+gaia updates without any legal issues. > > Where things get a bit more complex is when oems use their own update > mechanism, removing gecko's standard one. Currently in this case we > can't even switch users to another update channel. To fix that, we'll > need to provide a proper webapi for updates management instead of our > current mess, with pluggable implementations and the ability to switch > back to the default one. > > If we get these 2 parts done, I believe that will move us to a much > better position, where we would be able to confidently recommend devices > to users as upgradable. And I'm sure communities will provide > cyanogenmod-like updates too. > > Another annoyance is that we still can't update gaia apps without doing > a full update. That's pretty ridiculous to not be able to upgrade > productivity and media apps for instance. That is blocked on some APIs > being only available to certified apps. If we look at the calendar app, > only the "settings-read" permission is blocking it from being privileged > though. I may be wrong, but I'm less confident in a short term solution > here. > > I really want to get the update channel and web api parts happen for b2g > 2.0. Volunteers welcome! > > Fabrice > -- > Fabrice Desré > b2g team > Mozilla Corporation > _______________________________________________ > dev-b2g mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
