LWN.net Logo

ELC: Android and the community

ELC: Android and the community

Posted Apr 15, 2010 20:41 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877)
In reply to: ELC: Android and the community by cdibona
Parent article: ELC: Android and the community

some unicorn developer community that everyone seems to have a flavor of in their head.
Is this Official Google Position, that those outside Google and their official partners are a "unicorn developer community"?!


(Log in to post comments)

ELC: Android and the community

Posted Apr 15, 2010 22:05 UTC (Thu) by cdibona (subscriber, #13739) [Link]

Nope, but it is hard to address the concerns of people about the lack of community when in fact there is one. It is difficult to even converse about it when one persons community looks like drupal, while another like samba, while still another like the kernel.

ELC: Android and the community

Posted Apr 15, 2010 22:25 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

the common thing about all those communities is that they do more than just code dumps at every release.

they allow people who are not yet part of the project to see what they are doing, including how and why something is done.

if you only do one checkin per release, then you may as well just publish tarballs, a VCS is of limited help.

This is one huge portion of the problem that is being called out.

ELC: Android and the community

Posted Apr 16, 2010 2:44 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Plus, it's hard to winnow out which particular commit broke something; you're stuck with a ginormous monolithic patch. And sadly, not the 2001 type.

It's not quite as bad as tarballs (in the kernel, you'd have to first generate the patch) but it's not far off.

And then the other thing of there are people interested in using the tech in other places (the supercomputing thing in the article above) but are stopped by Google's foot-dragging. This is hardly ideal.

It may be the minimum required, but do you want to just have the minimum pieces of flair?

ELC: Android and the community

Posted Apr 20, 2010 19:31 UTC (Tue) by Epicanis (guest, #62805) [Link]

Reminds me of the "what is it with Linux people?" comment from the "Android Open Source and Compatilibility Lead" in the last thread on this topic. There definitely SEEMS to be a firm cultural attitude at Google that they not entangle themselves with "Linux" more than absolutely necessary.

It sounds an awful lot like Google would rather have android be "not Linux" in some fashion, perhaps instead "based on" Linux in the same way that some Disney movies can be said to be "based on a True Story". I hope this is just me being cynical, though.

Copyright © 2013, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds