ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[John McAleely <john.mcaleely@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 17/01/14 17:04, Oliver Grawert wrote:> hi,
> Am Freitag, den 17.01.2014, 16:47 +0000 schrieb John McAleely:
>> I think that is a genie we would rather not let out of the bottle. As
>> you note, there are already 7 cases where device specifics are needed. I
>> assume that as we gain more devices, that number will grow, even if we
>> also act to add generic abstractions into the common parts to manage
>> those device specifics.
> 
> well, as you can see from the discussion none of these 7 files *need* to
> be in the rootfs tarball ... the bluetooth one should be chipset

Understood & agreed. I think I'm surprised that we are adding stuff to
the android tarball in any of these cases, rather than building in
some sort of Ubuntu device specific tarball/image/partition/deb.

I think that most of these will be examples of Ubuntu choosing to use
a different userland stack to Android, and asking the Android tarball
to carry device configs for those sits oddly with me.

I agree that we will maintain a dependence on Android for some time, but
I'd like to minimize the number of things we add to 'Android' - after
all, that increases the maintenance for that tarball, and we should
assume that the OEMs familiar with that task will be much less familiar
about adding whatever appears over the next 6 months in the way of Ubuntu
device specifics.

I worry that we are creating a material obstacle to shipping and
maintaining Ubuntu phones, because there will be a set of poorly
understood additions needed 'just for Ubuntu' to the Android tree an OEM
maintains. Far better if those Ubuntu device customizations are clearly
separate in some way (even if the contents today are almost trivial),
since I think we also have a strategic interest in decreasing our
dependence on Android.

I believe making changes like this will be much harder as the number of
production non-reference devices increases, but perhaps that is the
mistake I am making.

J

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