On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Al Sutton <a...@funkyandroid.com> wrote:
> > Now before I start on the iPhone comparison I'm going to pre-empt the > normal > "But Android is open source....." response by saying lets be honest and > admit it as it stands Android is not an open source project because the > public "open source" repository is pretty worthless in its' current state. > As far as I know, "open-source" is not a value statement, but a set of conditions that rule how sources can be distributed and used. What is available from the git repositories is as open-source as it can be. You seem to believe that the fact that you can't produce exact G1 device images from them makes them worthless, but many people are already using them to port the platform to various other devices. Also, the Android team is trying to make these sources more useful to ADP1 owners, and closer to the internal tree used to prepare certain shipped device binaries. This is something that has been already discussed heavily in these forums and is quite well documented. There are some valid criticisms about this project's roadmap and management but I don't think this is one of them. > > The last time I tried to build the master branch it failed missing some > Google internal API classes. It is expected in any open-source project that sometimes the build of the most recent sources will not work correctly, or will not generate properly working code. This is generally fixed by providing patches, notifying of the problem, and/or waiting a bit for the fixes to be submitted. For the record, I did a full fresh download and build of the master branch two days ago and it built without any problem the "generic-eng" build product which is the only one you should care about at the moment. Oh, and networking is working in the emulator too. > The SDKs I've produce from the cupcake branch > seem to be considered by Google employees as pretty useless with comments > like "This is why we want to be clear it is "unofficial," because it is not > actually a working SDK" being thrown around First, it has been said several times in these forums that the cupcake branch is only there to reflect all the non-proprietary bits used by the internal Android source tree, and that you should not rely on it to build anything that works (be it system images or an SDK). You should really work from the master branch for anything "real". Also, the SDK is, compared to generic-eng, a very special build product for a variety of nasty technical details. Due to this it is very frequent that its build will not work or will miss crucial configuration files that break certain features. For cupcake, the tools team has also made a really big number of drastic changes to the way the SDK tools work in order to support new features like platforms, add-ons and AVDs, which did break custom SDK builds more than once. The SDK is also very special because when we release an official one, it comes with official documentation on the public web site, a set of publicly supported APIs which are a very strongly binding contract between app developers and the platform, plus quite a lot of testing to ensure that it works reasonably well in terms of features and host platform support. Believe it or not, this takes a lot of time These are the reasons we say the things you mention: you are packaging non-working SDKs and should not expect us to throw much of our support behind them. At the moment, we don't encourage application developers to use custom SDKs to test their code against Cupcake, do so at your own risk. > and networking in the emulator > still being broken a week after users started reporting the showstopper > problem (And Romain did hint that Google have a fix, I read > http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/msg/41fcefc36bd16d44 as > "there is a version where this is fixed"). Networking works well in the "generic-eng" build product of the master branch. I have tested the SDK build yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is broken, as explained previously. However, this is the kind of thing that will get fixed when preparing an official SDK release. Or you could look at this forum post, and integrate it into your custom build: http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/msg/bcd639ecee7f270b --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
