2008.9 - Was Re: Third request: what *is* the warranty on the Freerunner?

[Roland Mas]

Jay Vaughan, 2008-08-13 14:42:23 +0200 :

>> Idea of Open Source projects is to release them before they're
>> ready, to let community work on them as well.
>
> That would be fine in our case, *if* we could work on them
> concurrently, but there is so much cruft in dealing with the build
> environment - and too many forks in the details - that it makes it
> very unproductive to try to contribute.

  Oh come on.  After reading all your (and others') scary messages
about that, I decided to give it a try.  So I pointed my browser to
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/MokoMakefile.  Half an hour later, I had
a build in progress.  Most of that half-hour was spent waiting for
stuff to download, and part of the rest was due to my running the
whole stuff in a particular isolated environment (cowbuilder chroot,
for those who care) with its own characteristics (stuff runs as root,
and I didn't have a home directory).

  Of course, the build hasn't completed yet (I have a few *.ipk
already, but the webpage mentions 5 hours on a computer that's rather
faster than mine), but if pasting less than 15 commands straight from
a web page is too high a barrier to entry for prospective developers,
I doubt they'd be able to accomplish much even if it was a single
command to run.

  Half an hour.  15 commands to copy and paste.  How much more
hand-holding does a developer need?

Roland.
-- 
Roland Mas

A man walks into a bar.
Bang.