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Subject: Re: Release policy and coordination

Re: Release policy and coordination

From: Andrew Hart <ahart_at_dim.uchile.cl>
Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2006 10:05:54 -0400

I agree whole heartedly with the sentiments below concerning the
typical user who is too lazy, stupid or incapable of taking five
minutes to read the release notes. In addition, Rockbox has built up
a respectable name and image for itself, despite its development just
being done mostly for fun by the various developers. The core devs
and everybody involved in the Rockbox project should be able to take
justifiable pride in what has been acheved with Rockbox. It would be
a shame to lose this image simply because something is stamp
"official release" before it is truly ready.

Imho, battery life is an issue. The stock standard firmware can run
the Iriver H340 for 14 to 20 hours playing music, depending on the
format and bit rate, etc. I haven't done a proper battery test with
Rockbox, but Rockbox seems to run my unit for only 5-6 hours
typically. This will preclude the use of Rockbox for long flights.

Given that on all the Archos platforms and the Iriver IHP 1xx series
players, Rockbox usually runs significantly more efficiently than the
stock standard firmware, it seems likely that the power consumption
issue is a definite bug, probably hardware-based as has been pointed
out by others on this list, and in my opinion this ought to be fixed
before the H300 receives endorsement from the Rockbox crew as an
officially supported player.

Cheers,
Andrew.

At 22:19 31-05-2006, you wrote:
>I still think it'd be fair to make H100 the only _new_ release
>target for the time being. I mean the 3.0 code will be compileable
>for H300, and we can even make a 3.0 binary available for it, but
>calling it a "release" is like a stamp of approval, and it just
>doesn't seem right (in my opinion, of course) to release it with
>that type of bug regardless of how little or much it impeded use.
>
>There are _many_ people waiting for it to be "released" for H300 to
>use it, and if we say this is the release version, many people will
>not read anything else, and when they find the battery life poor
>expect that we've either given up on it, or declared it impossible
>to improve beyond this point and give up on using Rockbox.
>
>Many users don't read information on our site, or release notes, or
>anything, and I feel they could very easily make the wrong
>assumptions or become misinformed because of this, and it's much
>easier to simply say " 3.0 is officially for <Archos targets> and
>iRiver H1xx" then when the problem is resolved, either back the
>solution into the 3.0 code for that one problem, or simply include
>H300 in whatever release is after that fix.
>
>On 5/31/06, Christi Alice Scarborough
><<mailto:christi_at_chiark.greenend.org.uk>christi_at_chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>Linus Nielsen Feltzing wrote:
> > Mike Holden wrote:
> >> For me, the battery life is a non-issue and I use my unit a lot. It could
> >> always be improved on of course, but it's plenty good enough to release
> >> IMHO.
> >
> > If this was a question of optimization, I would agree. In this case, it
> > is a hardware issue, where some component is drawing a lot of current,
> > most likely because of a faulty initialization/use of the hardware.
>
>I have to say that I think a release without this fix in place seems
>plausible to me. I think we'd need to note the outstanding issue in the
>release notes and download page, but it's not something that actually
>stops H300 Rockbox working useably, definite bug though it is. It's
>not really missing functionality so much as suboptimal operation in my
>opinion, and while obviously it'd be better not to release without a
>fix, going ahead anyway might not be so terrible.
>
>Christi
>
Received on 2006-06-01

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