*brings up MMS* [huge thread deleted]
i'm not going to be snarky and the below doesn't apply to everyone, nor every single time. it is, however, far too common. i want to remind people that other people, developers for this story, have different perspectives on what is an acceptable tradeoff and what is desirable. i basically dropped the half way written SMS/MMS application that already supports several very handy features and has all but rendering support for MMS built in because of the really negative attitude primarily to MMS and backend interference^H^Hsupport. even though i consider my software very much alpha, it's far more advanced and capable than the existing sms software on FR. take this as chiding. you annoy|scare away developers for a lot of reasons. people bring up legitimate questions and points about things on IRC and they get slapped around because someone who is a long time identity in the channel disagrees. when was the FR first brought onto the market? one might reasonably make the mistake in expecting a stable and function structure to exist by today. but people who probably could significantly help make progress find this enclave to be an unwelcoming group. if ideas aren't spawned from inside the tribe, they're unappreciated and disparaged. documentation should be cleaned up and organized. pardon, but it's god awful frustrating to wade through scattered out of date and incomplete or entirely lacking documentation. much of what is available, is written by an "engineer" (a developer who isn't really good at communicating) who already knows how something works but fails to document how you get from step 1 to step 17 then skips to step 39. all of which applies only to a specific version of something that has already been deprecated with a wholly rewritten daemon, probably over a year ago. sure. this is a developer phone. but it's still wrong to make every new developer struggle insanely to understand how things work -currently- never mind you the way things worked a month ago. we don't even need to bring up the completely naive end user. i doubt this phone will ever have a set of software that works, as reliably and as expected, as something like the iphone, blackberry, droid, etc. certainly not with the established guard going on as usual. people bring up a question on irc and they get yelled at to go RTFM. new developers have every bit of right to yell back at you to WTFM. people don't gripe for one or two little annoyances. they start griping when required things break, frequently. they gripe when there are numerous bugs, visible bugs, that don't get fixed for a year or two. if there's a lot of griping from "end users" that pisses you off, there's a reason for it. your bugginess level has well exceeded average tolerances. when someone comes up with a new approach or idea and it isn't from the established guard - it's a bad thing. apparently. because the established guard knows how it should be done. which is why years down the road it still isn't doing, still isn't stable, and still isn't featureful. it's entirely OK to run on a kernel without any debugging enabled for most people. most people are neither kernel developers, nor do they need to deal with debug information until something breaks. if something breaks and affects everyone, it shouldn't have been put into distribution in the first place. there's clearly a difference between development software which might exhibit unexpected bugs or issues, and software which the developer knows is going to blow up 45 seconds into use. on the whole, the kernel is normally a very very stable beast. there's really not a whole lot different the kernel does on the little FR that it doesn't do on your desktop. debugging code removal from the disted kernel has been brought up before, it just faded away because there wasn't a nasty irc spat. if you want to make progress, stop getting pissed off at at "end users" when they report mountains of bugs and have complaints, or can't get something to work. especially when you dist software which is known to be buggy or incompatible with the previous version released last week. most people bought this phone knowing it has rough edges. most know that they know they should be a developer. however, it's a phone and most people have a natural inclination to want to use it as a phone. especially after paying $400US. you haven't provided these new people with much if any initial support in their first experience with the phone or the software. either by help or documentation in the software itself, or via a website. people can go back over the email archives for the past few years and see this particular type of drama-fest erupt frequently. nobody wants to recommend this project to other embedded developers because of this. 'tis a good way to ensure existing developers keep ripping their hair out and are barraged by complaints. please reconsider where you stand and how you treat new or different ideas and the people expressing them. they don't need to be dragged into the rut of how you do things, they need to drag you out of your rut. -david
