Queru: Another year of AOSP [LWN.net]

Queru: Another year of AOSP

Posted Dec 30, 2011 19:51 UTC (Fri) by Shachar (guest, #67086)
In reply to: Queru: Another year of AOSP by gnu
Parent article: Queru: Another year of AOSP

That's because there hardly were any.

In the beginning of the year, that was because Honeycomb diverged from Gingerbread enough that any attempt to submit a patch to the core OS would result in "conflict with Google's internal tree". Usually that clears up as soon as there is a code drop to AOSP, but for Honeycomb, that never happened. By the time Ice Cream Sandwich was released to AOSP, Gerrit, the patch review system used by Google, was down with the rest of the services that used to reside on kernel.org. To date, it has not been restored.

This means that since about January, and still ongoing, contributing to AOSP became more and more impractical, until the kernel.org fiasco, where it became downright impossible.

Shachar

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Queru: Another year of AOSP

Posted Dec 31, 2011 15:00 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (4 responses)

Why was Google using kernel.org for critical Android infrastructure? They certainly have the resources to host it themselves. Was it some sort of misguided goodwill gesture? If so, why didn't they at least ensure that everything was sufficiently backed up that they could set up an alternate server immediately if required?

I agree nobody would have foreseen this sort of outage on kernel.org. Still, for a company like Google to use other (free) resources rather than their own seems strange.

Queru: Another year of AOSP

Posted Dec 31, 2011 15:20 UTC (Sat) by janschulz (guest, #82047) [Link] (3 responses)

Because the kernel.org infrastructure and admins are quite good at what they do: https://plus.google.com/112413860260589530492/posts/EJCsV...

Queru: Another year of AOSP

Posted Dec 31, 2011 21:14 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

That's pretty awesome

Queru: Another year of AOSP

Posted Jan 1, 2012 3:39 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

Very interesting. Still, the kernel.org people were volunteers and it seems to me Google had enough expertise to do this on their own. Maybe they did substantially help out kernel.org in the process, so it was a win on both sides?

It will be a pity if the combination of closed honeycomb and kernel.org outage really has reduced outside involvement in AOSP to such a long-term extent as this. On the other hand, hopefully these things - the honeycomb mistake in particular - will not occur again.

I also found it odd that Queru has 'given up' on Motorola, which Google purchased a few months ago.

Queru: Another year of AOSP

Posted Jan 3, 2012 5:40 UTC (Tue) by dtlin (subscriber, #36537) [Link]

Google announced its intent to buy Motorola several months ago. The actual purchase, if it happens, would be several more months in the future – the deal has yet to pass regulatory review in the US and EU.