maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - Proposal: To include some Core Members with low Karma in Dev Program

	allnameswereout	2009-10-19 , 02:50
	Posts: 3,397 \| Thanked: 1,212 times \| Joined on Jul 2008 @ Netherlands	#74

Originally Posted by Nathan

I never said it was easy. ;-) I said it was work-able without a device. Trust me I am well aware of how "very" hard it can be trying to debug something remotely w/o having a device. (I've been doing development for over 20 years) -- And to top that off my own learning style (and my ability to debug) is completely hands on/physical. My wife hates when I "show" her how to fix a problem because I literally have to take control of her machine -- I can't verbally walk her through it. I am a very hands on type of person. But the point is yes the device would be very nice, and it would allow certain tests to be easily performed. But most things can be done in the scratchbox and tested their. You can get it running; then you can ask the community to vet the project and make sure their are no other "oddities" that show up on the real device. If you are unaware -- you need to know the Scratchbox runs the same versions of the software the device does. When I pull a library from extras in the scratchbox; it is the same library a n900 would pull. So they are a lot closer than I think you think they are.

I agree the SDK can get you far but it isn't a complete replacement and it probably will never be. You stated in earlier post:

you developers do not need a device to get things going at all!

(Emphasis mine.)

..and that is not true.

The Scratchbox+SDK platform does not use the same architecture the target platform uses. It either runs x86-32 software, or uses QEMU to emulate ARMEL. QEMU contains bugs. For example, see cmake thread, or fact it doesn't run GUI, and sometimes my ARMEL environment is screwed and I have no clue what happened. So architecture specific problems are concern. It is also difficult to test usability without touchscreen and finger/stylus using mouse instead. I wonder how Nokia deals with this internally?!

Which brings me to Scratchbox not emulating certain hardware features the real device has. For example, I've seen posts about using GPS and Bluetooth inside the SDK. The former is easy to solve (gpsd or gpsfake running on host platform port 2947 reachable from Scratchbox) but the latter is a bit harder to solve. Another example, and that is my main reason, is that it doesn't emulate performance of Nokia N900 rendering tools such as htop, iotop, powertop, latencytop, nearly useless.

Although the number of situations these problems arise is up for debate, karma reflects past effort not present or future effort, and I'm not saying above must be fixed (is difficult), it is IMO important to take note.

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