On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 15:04:27 +0300 "ni nhar" <nin...@inbox.lv> wrote:
> > I would wait until it starts being mass produced.
>
> That would be one way to deal with the pinephone.
> A hesitant
> approach. To me the pinephone is a move against
> established manufactures. Free software people have
> an interest in promoting the phone, assuming it
> works. One
> part is providing as many software systems and as
> fast as
> doable.
In my opinion there is no hurry to port Replicant to the Pinephone right
now unless new developers volunteer to do it:
- Most of the current developers are involved in porting Replicant to
Android 9 in a way or in another. This is required to get the
Pinephone working on Replicant. The first device(s) that will be
supported in Replicant 9 will be devices already supported by
Replicant 6 and mainline Linux, like the Galaxy SIII (i9300). There
are many different reasons for that:
- We started working on it this way, and we even got funding for
that.
- It enables to spot some regressions: we have no automated testing
infrastructure yet. So here users testing Replicant 9 might be able
to find new bugs that weren't present on Replicant 6. It also
enable to test some of the changes on Replicant 6 (I need to do
that for the modem protocol code for instance), and even to look at
both source code to compare, do graphics performance benchmarks,
etc.
- The device can easily be bought and many contributors already have
them.
- Many users probably expect to still be able to upgrade to Replicant
9 on their smartphones.
- Wiki Pages, installation instructions, etc already exist for
Replicant 6 devices and they are better known.
- Adding support for the Pinephone on Replicant 6 makes no sense, as
it will be way harder than adding support for it on Replicant 9. A
big part of the work done for porting Replicant to Android 9 will be
easily reusable for the Pinephone. The same applies to other
smartphones and tablets that have good upstream Linux support.
- Also the Pinephone is not released yet, and some hardware details
might change. It may also have production issues or delays, as
manufacturing hardware is hard.
Once we have something working on Replicant 9 with the Galaxy SIII
(i9300) and/or similar devices, we will very seriously consider looking
into the Pinephone, especially if it has been released at that point.
If it's not released yet at that point we might also consider trying to
get some funding for working on other devices, in a way that enables to
reuse the code for the Pinephone and other similar devices, for instance
to support their modem, in order to minimize the amount of work required
to make it work once such devices are released.
In the meantime we plan to have some discussions in the Replicant
meeting that will happens this weekend[1] on topic indirectly related to
the Pinephone such as:
- How to add support for modem that are already supported in
GNU/Linux, in Replicant 9.
- What will be, in the long run, the minimum freedom requirements for
the devices supported by Replicant?
- How do we deal with upstream GNU/Linux and Android? Do we use Ofono
in Replicant? Do we write librils to interface with lower level
libraries? etc.
References:
-----------
[1]https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/ReplicantContributorsMeetingJuly2019
Denis.
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