Hey Chris, On 03.06.2014 13:00, Chris Mills wrote: > This is really interesting feedback; thanks Johannes! I can only really speak > for the documentation aspect of the project, so the comments below will only > focus on those. I’ll let other better qualified team members comment on the > dev process issues, etc.
Reading through my message again, it's clear that I really hit the wrong tone. I sound all bitchy and pissed which is not what I wanted to come across as. Thanks for ignoring that attitude and focusing on the content. I guess I just wrote myself in a bit of a rage in some spots and it really shows. That's rather nasty and I'll cut it out. > One thing I will say is that the OS is getting better all the time. I’ve been > dogfooding a 2.0 build for a little while, and there are a lot of UX > improvements found there. Hm, would you recommend 2.0 for dogfooding purposes? Or which version is recommended for non-development work? It would be helpful if there was a recommendation on what branch people should build (at the time I flashed my phone that was 1.2). > We also have mozilla.org Firefox OS release notes, for example: > > http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/notes/1.2/ > > These are where the more use-centric information is kept, so I decided to > just make the MDN stuff developer-focused. Aaaaah, thank you! That is precisely what I was looking for. Don't know why I couldn't find it, when I google "firefox os changelog" now it's the first hit. > But perhaps I should make these more visible with a link up the top, rather > than just at the bottom of the huge list of dev changes? I think a link to those would be really great! Are there user-release notes for 1.4 too? > Another issue I should flag here is that, for a lot of build wants, we are at > the mercy of the phone manufacturer/OEM to provide easy-install builds; > licensing issues in many cases prevent us from just issuing builds, so we > have to wait for the phone companies to make them available. Some companies > (such as geeksphone) have been great at providing up to date builds to Flash > to your phone, some not so great. Yes, I understand there are vendor-specific components. One problem for me is that I cannot tell which components are proprietary (vendor-specific) and which aren't. During the build process the phone has to be hooked up so it can fetch these proprietary files. It's not transparent to me where these files end up and how I can back them up properly. This also means that rebuilding a whole tree after a long time is difficult, because all the fetch-proprietary-things step has to be done again. Would it maybe be possible that the installer fetches the proprietary files and creates one single file (proprietary.tar.gz) that I could download once from my phone and then just drop-in into my build tree? That'd be rather cool since I could have my proprietary.tar.gz backed up, remove the tree after 6 month, reclone everything, drop in the tar.gz and just rebuild (and end up with a working image). > It’s not just as simple as downloading a new browser to your desktop. > Apologies if you already knew all this, but I just wanted to make sure, as > many people miss this detail. I agree that this issue is not transparent enough. And actually when I first installed the phone I ended up bricking it (wouldn't detect the SIM card). Back then I got pointers to the mailing list, but it would be really cool when there was some documentation about what the reasons are for this and (probably even more important) how to fix them. Thinking about it, maybe I'll write a wrapper script that does exactly what I propose. That will clone the different repos, have some rudimentary i18n support (will create these json files for instance) and will be able to extract and re-feed that proprietary.tar.gz tarball. Maybe I think I could play around with it some more and give it a shot. Thanks for your patience again, Cheers, Johannes _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
