GTA02 is now an expensive brick

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2009 05:49:39 -0800 (PST) Gothnet <openmoko at nastylittlehorse.net>
babbled:

> 
> 
> 
> Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)-2 wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > the real history is one of enigneers trying to push off the ever changing
> > flavor of the month idea and trying to just get stuff to work. while
> > kernel
> > guys wrestled, userspace was being flung every which way... and not by me
> > - not
> > by harald. guess who was driving all the changes? you might want to dig up
> > a
> > bit more complete history before jumping to conclusions. :)
> > 
> > 
> 
> Hey, no insult was implied and as a Software Engineer myself I know two
> things -
> 
> 1. Management are not only frequently wrong, but often difficult to persuade
> otherwise
> 2. If I'm given a free reign I'll go for stuff I'm interested in a find
> stimulating
> 
> My point is (and I hope I haven't missed the point of your comment when
> stating this) that there doesn't seem to have been a consistent set of goals
> or direction from the OM management or any particular focus (bar "Back to
> Basics") to get the kernel and basic userspace functioning reliably, and
> there does seem to have been a tendency to reinvent the wheel. And the
> keyboard, the package manager....

yes - and these directives came from... management. engineering RESISTED or had
the practical "lets use what we have and improve it as we go - some bits can be
fixed/improved piecemeal, others need replacing in a bigger lump". but it means
you can work on just getting something to work and then improve it as you go. i
think that "given free reign" the enigneers would have done a much better job.
much much much better. i tried my best to focus my efforts on doing things
where my experience/knowledge would mean i can hit the ground running. fixing
kernel suspend issues are not things i can hit the ground running on. but
userspace suspend/resume infra i can - and i did (ompower). i spent a little
while making a map navigation "widget" for diversity when that was all the
rage. i worked on connman for wifi (the userspace bits for driving it) and
finally got it to work - but was beginning to hit nasty wifi driver bugs. that
was in addition to all the rest. i absolutely never spent 3 months on the
keyboard - simply sean remembers a gap of 3 months and towards the end of those
i did the keyboard - doing many other things prior to it.

if management had actually given "free reign"they would have said:

make the phone boot in a reasonable time
make it last at least 48hrs without needing a recharge
make it reliably make and receive phone calls and sms's
make it sane/possible to enter text for sms's and contact information etc.
make the other hardware function properly (wifi, gps, accelerometers)
make some demo apps for the non-core hardware for a phone (gps, wifi, etc.) to
show that it works and how to drive it.
show us progress every 1 (or 2, 3 or 4) weeks with a new os image on a gta02.

then sit back and let engineering do its job. the regular demos of "stuff
moving along" (or a good explanation why you cant show anything currently)
would be the oversight needed to make sure engineers didn't stray off-track.

-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    raster at rasterman.com