On 06/03/2014 04:48 AM, Johannes Bauer wrote:
> About the usage: One of the very very first things I noticed was that
> the phone had a irritating, annoyning and most of all completely useless
> vibration effect when pressing the home button. It's one of the first
> tickets I commented on and it was annoying enough for me to actually
> patch the relevant code (described solution in #885716). Six months
> later: I tried to pull a 1.4 branch only to realize this is still
> exactly the same code. A dev had the ticket assigned to himself only to
> disassign it a few days back saying this isn't going anywhere.

While I rather like the vibration when tapping the home button (this may
be partly because it's pretty subtle on the device I use), I certainly
agree that we don't have enough control over when the phone vibrates in
general. I basically refuse to dogfood a Firefox OS device until it has
the ability to be in vibration mode when it's in my pocket, and then
automatically switch to ringing when it's plugged in.

Unfortunately, as a developer on the project, I've found that I rarely
have the time to fix the issues that I'd like, since most of my time and
energy is spent working on things that the telecoms want. I have a bug
that's been around for over a year in the music app[1], and I've been
working on a patch for 8 months now, and I still haven't had time to
polish off the last couple of features to land it! I might be able to
land it for 2.1, but that's because of a larger push to improve the
music app, not because I'll suddenly have the free time to work on
issues that matter to me personally.

I also find it a bit sad that many of us who work full-time on Firefox
OS don't seem to have the time to help volunteer contributors get their
patches landed. As someone whose employment at Mozilla came about from
volunteer contributions, this is a pretty big deficiency in my opinion.
Still, I understand that everyone is busy, and many of us probably just
want a few weeks to take it easy, instead of adding yet another thing to
our workload.

I guess this ended up being fairly pessimistic, but I do see some hope
on the horizon. If we can just get to the point where our changes don't
cause regressions, we should have the time to focus on all the little
things in our backlogs. Other teams may be in different spots with this,
but I think the media apps are doing pretty well at preventing
regressions. During 1.4, we added a huge number of tests, so we can
usually be somewhat assured that we're not breaking anything when we
make a change.

- Jim

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=841949
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