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

[Steven **]

The MokoMakefile is great.  I've had it working for months.  But I
still don't know how I would contribute to OM.  There's a wiki page
about using the MokoMakefile to edit the existing packages.  But I
don't think that addresses actually contributing said changes back to
OM.  Maybe I'm just missing something.

Now I have used the toolchain to make my own little app.  But I don't
think that's what Jay meant by contributing.

-Steven

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Roland Mas <lolando at debian.org> wrote:
> 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