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Greetings,
By the end of the year, looking back, it's fair to say
that kernel
porting efforts to different devices achieved good progress
in this
year - well, just as in previous years too  .
What becomes more and more evident however is that we
don't have
good means to express and track status of individual ports.
Even
kernel developers oftentimes cannot tell does some or
another feature
work in another port, and what is its general state.
This is major drawback in our process, as it makes active
kernel
developers duplicate effort, doesn't foster inflow of new
developers
and contributors, and makes developers and users two
separate camps,
having low insight in each other's needs and work.
Of course, we have wiki pages and they are updated with
ports's
statuses, especially for ports in active development. What
we lack is
consistent wiki pages conventions to represent such status,
and
estimation procedure. Well, actually we have, and for more
than year
now. http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/PortingProj
ectFrontpageTemplate
page have detailed RFC, authored by Andrew Vovk, available
for more
than year now. And some ports, mostly newer, - Eten
G500/M500/M600,
HTC Wizard, Siemens SX1 - already use it. Once I learned
about that
template, I also gradually converted h4000 and h3900 (2.6)
pages to
it.
The PortingProjectFrontpageTemplate seems to very well
thought out
proposal, will takes into account needs of different target
audiences,
with emphasis on ease of access for users. Let me outline
its crucial
points:
1. Port's main page starts with status table, which clearly
and
unambiguously (works/doesn't work) outlines state of each of
handheld's feature. This main pages should contain only
basic info in
addition to it, like credits, means to get further
information.
2. All features are broken down in groups, with familiar
status letter
assigned to each, from D (most basic support) to A (complete
support),
with usual + and - modifiers. Once handheld has all feature
working in a
group, it is considered to achieve corresponding status,
assuming that
all previous groups are complete. Each status roughly
corresponds to
usability level, like "just boots kernel",
"well suitable for
development", "suitable for daily use with basic
PDA functionality",
"supports more advanced usage (still as basic
PDA)", "full support
for device-specific features".
3. There's consistent and not overloaded menubar structure.
So, given that PortingProjectFrontpageTemplate exists for
extended
time, I would like to propose all port maintainers to review
it,
provide feedback for and suggestions for what features it
may lack and
how to handle them, and strongly consider supporting and
migrate port
wiki pages to the proposed structure. As Andrew currently
works on
other projects, I would volunteer to process this feedback
and work
towards elaborating the template, while ensuring consistency
and
support for needs of different devices. I myself would like
to update
hx4700 and h2200 ports, as most advanced
("complete") ports to the new
design, as with them being pronounced complete, their wikis
suffer
from undermaintenance and in great need for an update to
capture tehir
current state.
Together with introduction of port status codes, I would
like to
update http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/SupportedHandheldS
ummary to
record it instead of less-insightful "Linux boots
column". (Actually,
I already started that for h3900 & h4000). At the same
time, I would
like to remove "Boots with X bootloader" footnotes
from it - this is
exactly the kind of information which is better be written
on
individual ports pages, and only disperses attention on a
general
status page.
So, please share your feedback/concerns/ideas regarding
this
proposal, and I hope it will get attention of both
developers and
users.
Thanks (and Merry Christmas)!
--
Paul mailto:pmiscml gmail.com
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