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Subject: Re: Announce: Ipod 5G with accelerated scrolling beta available

Re: Announce: Ipod 5G with accelerated scrolling beta available

From: <postmaster_at_diffenbach.org>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 15:14:47 -0400

Bluechip wrote:
> You may (or may not) also like to take a moment to review the
> history of the developer in question here, he has an impeccable
> reputation (far from that which I could claim for myself) ...I
> can't believe that he is doing this for anything other than
> honourable reasons.

Thanks Bluechip. (You must be thinking of the battery-life stuff,
interrupted when my archos broke.)

The reason I'm not yet releasing the patch is two-fold: one, the code
is still crufty, littered with cryptic logfs and commented-out
experiments. Some of the code is in an entirely new file, and I'm
unclear how diff and patch will deal with that. Some ints should
probably be replaced with enums, some constant values with manifest
constants. Comments should be added so that programmers who are not me
can more easily follow it. In short, the code works, but it's not
ready for others to read.

Two, I want to get feedback on how it works, so that the patch when
released has reasonable default settings; I don't want to release a
patch with errors, have a bunch of people use it and complain about
the errors, only for me to have to tell them, use version 2 of the
patch. The logfs are necessary for the beta testing, but I don't want
them in released code, especially since a bug in logfdump limits lines
to about 25 characters, requiring really short cryptic debug messages,
like these:

finger down, 41141606,67
e, 41157655,64
p: 41157754, BACK, 96237
b1:0,-3, a:67,64
b2:41157882
e, 41173701,62
e, 41205790,61
b1:-3,-6, a:64,61
b2:41205940
e, 41237880,60
e, 41253937,59
d1,41061517,41205940
d2,144423,-6,41
g:-41,0
h1: 0


And finally, given that Rockbox (like any project) has more users than
coders, I've found with past patches that I get more feedback if I
release a build than a patch.

As to concerns that the "secret" code might trash a machine, that's a
valid one. But any obvious trashing I'd have seen (or experienced when
I tested this build and its dozen experimental, unreleased,
predecessors); anything non-obvious, well, who is reading patches that
closely. (Maybe someone is, more power to him.)

I just want a chance to spiff up the code AFTER getting beta tester
feedback. Once I'm happy with the code, I'll be happy to share it.
Received on 2006-06-23

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