Certainly I'm not directing any of this at you, Ben. At least for me this is more of an open letter (or string of open letters) to the folks who make these decisions at Palm.
This is an ostrich head in the sand position to take. Obviously any software house develops tools for internal use that sometimes graduate to external use. I can even accept that these tools are provided "as-is" without warranty to us. However if Palm really wants to foster the growth of its developer community and retain them, they can't ignore this sort of thing and hope it goes away. This tool may be primarily an internal tool, but the day they made it publicly available it became a reflection of Palm and a product for us developers. Right now the message to me is, "Palm doesn't care that they gave us a tool to use that just plain doesn't work." To me it seems like it's not that Palm can't find the problem in the simulator, it's that they aren't even looking. I think what made POSE work so well is the fact that the developer community was allowed to help improve it. There are many members of the Palm Dev community out there who put untold hours into fixing and/or improving POSE. I understand that Palm's resources are limited. All our resources are limited. It's only by working together with us that both our goals can be accomplished: a robust simulation environment that we share the cost of maintaining and improving. Just my .02 -Aaron >-----Original Message----- >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ben Combee >Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2005 5:05 PM >To: Palm Developer Forum >Subject: Re: How to find a bug that crashes Simulator? > >I wasn't trying to excuse it, just present the reality that's >there. The >primary purpose for the simulators at was always supporting internal >developers and licensees. Supporting external developers was >a secondary >role for the tool, but there was little effort put into making the >simulators a robust debugging environment for someone who >couldn't build >the simulators from source. > >PalmSource did make a lot of effort into getting ARM emulators >working, but >there were performance problems, and there was also the issue of the >PalmSource reference hardware not actually being identical to >any of the >devices that licensees would ship. If you look at the Janerio >tool that's >in the PalmSource Inside Track program, you'll see that it >only emulates >one particular Intel reference board, and it also doesn't have >all of the >hooks into the OS that the old POSE had. > >-- Ben Combee, Senior Software Engineer, Palm, Inc. > "Combee on Palm OS" weblog: http://palmos.combee.net/ > Developer Forum Archives: http://news.palmos.com/read/all_forums/ > > >-- >For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or >to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/ > > -- For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
