daily-feed vs. SRCREV

[Holger Freyther]

On Wednesday 30 July 2008 16:27:17 Rod Whitby wrote:
> Julian Chu wrote:

> >    Actually, the buildhost didn't build ASU branch at all.
> > We did that work on another machine in Taipei.
>
> Hmm - so you *don't* want the public to be testing ASU yet?

Tough. We want testing, we didn't want people running around and saying this 
is ASU when it was/is not ready and subject to change. The compromise (AFAIK) 
was to make everything for ASU publically available, even the feed, but not 
the images (to make it a bit harder). At least this is how I understood the 
decision and I'm confident we will review it after the release of ASU which 
is going to happen soon.


>
> >   Sorry, I am not 100% understand the last setences, could you please
> >   explain that more ?
>
> Sure.
>
> My understanding is that ASU is the distribution that Openmoko intends
> to support into the future (as opposed to supporting 2007.2 into the
> future).
>
> To get the best testing of the distribution you are supporting, you want
> to have the largest number of people testing the exact same
> distribution, so you get consistent and reproducible bug reports.

I totally agree. The lack of images lead to people trying the upgrade from 
org.openmoko.dev to org.openmoko.asu.stable creating interesting issues.

After the release of ASU we will provide bugfixes for sure, we will make sure 
that upgrade from ASU to ASU+1 is as smooth as possible. We are not yet sure 
if we are always going to have up to date images or if we generate them once 
a month (or such). All this is still in planning but I think we see ASU as 
start of a series of upgrades for present and future versions of our phones.

So some planned (engineering) things:
	- Allow to remove everything but the installer from the GUI
	- Make the boot process nice (faster and less mode switching)
	- Improve infrastructure, start integrating fso APIs...



> All my opinion, of course, but I do this on the same sort of scale (5
> firmware distros three of which are based on OE, over 20K people on the
> mailing list, millions of firmware and package downloads) for the
> nslu2-linux.org project ...

Do you have any documentation on when you create images, how you test them 
before a release, how to handle your feeds (with upgraded packages), how to 
test upgrading is possible?

kind regards
	z.