Porting in 2019 - a true journey
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Hi Folks,
I will try to take you on a journey into Portingland, of which I once said it´s like a rabbit hole, making a bad quote from Alice in Wonderland.
On this endeavour I will be accompanied by other people from the community. It will be fun, full of Information and nobody knows where we are going to land.
We will start next week. Possible formats are blog style, small videos and podcasts. Let´s see! Your Feedback will be welcomed.
BR Florian
My languages: 🇦🇹 🇩🇪 🇬🇧 🇺🇸
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@Flohack oh, great idea!! Blogs and videos are better than podcasts for this kind of teaching IMO
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@Flohack Sounds good to me definitely vids and blogs for me. I find them easier to follow and refer back to.
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What device are you planning to port to?
A blog would be great. If it was a how-to, some of us might learn enough to get us started down the road to porting to other devices. I have a Mi A1 with Halium support courtesy of the LuneOS people.
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Well we are a group of people from Vienna, there are several devices in the loop. Will come back with more details
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@Flohack probably you're going to use a lot of Vienna bread... boards
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We discussed this topic shortly today and it would probably be interesting to hear what the community wants to say.
We are currently deciding whether it should be a straight audio cast or a video stream, but at least we will provide good information about porting over some medium (ofc).
How does interviewing people from the porting community sound? Also, what common questions could you come up with for our first episode? Have you tried porting and failed miserably? Need some structured tips and tricks on common ways of debugging?
Let us know and let's together build a knowledge base for others to follow!
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Add documentation to the ubports docs!
Videos and podcasts are flashy, but good documentation is invaluable.
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@Giiba said in Porting in 2019 - a true journey:
Add documentation to the ubports docs!
Videos and podcasts are flashy, but good documentation is invaluable.
+1
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I second the support for working the documentation in UBports Docs, it is better to keep things organized and centralized, and at least for me reading is much more valuable that watching a video, but I'm from a non-media generation. For instance I'm still struggling with the lack of mailing lists in this community (fortunately we have this forum, because I get completely lost in the chats).
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@wgarcia we have mailing lists but nobody uses them
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@advocatux No criticism intended, as I said, I'm from another generation, I struggle each time I have to recover some information from the chats, instead I'm quite good at recovering information from forums and archived mailing lists.
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@wgarcia I didn't understand it as criticism, don't worry, I just wanted to tell you about our mailing lists in case you didn't know them. And yes, it seems people like a different kind of platforms for communication these days.
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Hi, very good idea.
In my case I have no knowledge at all on how to port UT to another device.
What I need to know to get started is:
- How to identify a device eligible to porting
- What are the tools I need to know to achieve this goal
- A glossary of all the terms, tools, softwares, technologies or other stuff I don't understand.
- The main steps and a methodology on how to get to a full working image.
According to me the first thing required (and the most important) is the glossary.
Most of the time I don't understand a term and I'm not able to search for it because it's not something easy to spot on internet if you don't know what it is...
For example search for ADB without any idea of what it might be (now I know, but it took a while to figure it out when android was first released)I like the idea of a blog with some videos and screenshots to understand what we are talking about.
The UBPorts documentation is nice, but for graphical items I think it lacks few pictures to illustrate things...
Thanks a lot for all your contributions.
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@advocatux said in Porting in 2019 - a true journey:
@wgarcia we have mailing lists but nobody uses them
Yes, nobody uses them because they are not promoted by the UBports core team. In the times of UbuntuTouch (Canonical) we have had very successful communication over the list ubuntu-phone@lists.launchpad.net (the list is even still active and from time to time I get mails from it or ask there for help).
When Canonical closed the "shop" and we moved to UBports, started this idea "we don't need mailing lists, we need this ongoing gaggle in the tg groups" which is not archived and not searchable and full of posts which have nothing to do with technical problems, full of jpegs/gifs/emotions etc. When we (wgarcia and I) tried to subscribe in December 2017 the list has even been moderated and subscription was a mess.The forum here is better, at least archived and searchable. But one needs a browser and to be online, while mails could be read offline. I.e. the forum is far away from being as useful as a mailing list.
Just my humble opinion on this.
Matthias
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@Giiba improved documentation is what I meant by stating that we'd like to improve the knowledge base, It'll profit directly from what we can gather.
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Glad to hear documentation was in the plan
@AppLee has a good list, whereas I don't even know enough to have come up with such a list.
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@AppLee luckily the porting docs are not in that bad shape, but you need both:
- First read through http://docs.halium.org/en/latest/ - but maybe dont start immediately, as to get the full picture you will also need
- https://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/porting/introduction.html and both link to each other in some places.
Though I am an insider I followed the documents for a device some weeks ago, and I found them quite understandable. But please give some feedback if you find things that need clarification. It´s hard to write a good documentation without review from non-knowers so to say.
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And here it is: The first episode! https://soundcloud.com/ubports/porting-a-true-journey-episode-1-where-do-we-begin - Enjoy!
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@Flohack I just listened to your audiocast. It was very interesting. I noticed that your audio was crystal clear - much better than Alfred's. He sounded somewhat muffled. Do you have a better microphone or an audio processor? It would be great if Alfred and Aaron could be made to sound as good as you.
