Weekly Engineering News 38/2008

[Marek Lindner]

Hi,

as Wolfgang is out of town I jump in and try to summarize what happened last 
week. Hope you don't mind.  ;-)

Bug fixing, bug fixing, bug fixing:
Last week our PM plus his Q&A team pushed even harder to get things fixed. 
2008.9 was on the way and needed some more love here and there. Finally, it 
was released yesterday night (Taipeh time). The last days/hours were spent 
collecting all bits and bytes of information to properly document the 
changes / improvements / known issues. Everything was made public on our 
wiki. That is the kind of work nobody wants to do but everybody wants to 
have. :-) 

Decentralizing the package maintenance:
We noticed more and more hints / patches come in from the community. Sometimes 
we don't respond within a short time frame - we know that. Developing a phone 
is a huge task. We simply are too few people to handle all this input. Be 
patient with us. To improve the situation we were disucssing a more 
decentralized package maintenance approach. Openmoko would give write access 
to its own OE tree to community people which maintain packages / bumb up 
revisions / include patches. Openmoko would centrally build & distribute it. 
That way Openmoko would give away some of its control but would gain speed in 
the development process. You would be able to bring in new packages and 
extend the platform as you wish. One day if your package does not build the 
build system goes on with the next package. Our admin team is trying to find 
a way to protect us from vandalism (see: 
https://admin-trac.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1554) and we have to think about 
how that could look like in detail. What do you think ?

Hiring, hiring, hiring:
Also, we are looking at many candidates to hire experienced engineers / people 
in nearly all fields. We spoke to several mechanical and layout engineers, IT 
and Q&A people, software developers. We have many open positions but its not 
easy to find the right mix of attitude, cultural background and expertise 
towards Open Source. We keep on searching and let you know once new people 
join us.


Marek