S905 going to official builds?

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    Some of our community developers are burning out from the hassle of trying to support an ever-increasing amount of sh1t hardware that requires over-complex installation hackery and a ever-increasing population of users who are a bit too self-entitled and whiny when their $25 box doesn't deliver the $500 experience they were inappropriately expecting. At the moment I'd estimate that 85% of the support posts in this forum come from devices that represent 8% of our userbase. That's not sustainable.

    So we are going to publish a Generic S905 image that community developers can contribute proven changes towards while the core project handle the boring stuff related to building and releasing things. It means the image will have a considerably slower release schedule; but should become more stable over time. To drive stability we will not adopt high maintenance features like "install to internal" storage which are responsible for at least 50% of the installation issue posts in this forum.

    Community developers have also decided to bump up to the Android 'Nougat' kernel. However, Amlogic 3.14 kernels are full of crap code so newer doesn't necessarily mean better, and there is a very real risk that this introduces a slew of new bugs. Our challenge is to do as little as possible with this build project as ultimately it will be thrown under a bus the moment a viable mainline kernel option exists. Sadly that will not happen within the Kodi Leia release schedule, so this is a stop-gap. Albeit a stop-gap that will be an important learning experience for the project.

    chewitt I completely disagree and such postings does nothing but discourage development on this platform, what it needs is more encouragement... not less and what you get for your $25 is great value for money... certainly way more than what you would get when comparing to the likes of the Raspberry Pi.

    Whining is ok because not everybody is fortunate enough to have the same level of knowledge and understanding as some of us however I do not believe anybody has the same expectations for a $25 as say a $250 device and if they do then the correct response would be to remind them of this rather than calling them self-entitled and whiny.

    Installation is as simple as burning an ISO to a USB drive... so to say it is over-complex and involves hackery is a gross overstatement, it is more simple than some of the other devices LE supports in-fact.

    "install to internal" is not a high maintenance feature but that is a technical debate that I will not enter, I would say the problem is more of a lack of understanding and we are partly responsible as developers for that for not explaining it in a manner that is easy to understand. There is no wiki pages for anything pertaining to Amlogic devices just a few forum posts that do not really do the process any justice other than to confuse. A classic example would be that there is nothing that really goes into detail about which DTB to use.

    The only part of your post I agree with is the kernel but it would be worth mentioning that full mainline kernel support for Amlogic devices is very near and progress can be viewed here.

    All of this is going way of subject with the initial posting by the OP but the simple answer would be from my perspective it is very 50/50 with the hostility and resistance centered around Amlogic projects from some of the more senior LE developers and due to the fact that everybody seems to want to jump on the Rockchip bus.

    If it is difficult to support all amlogic boxes, I would just concentrate on a number of high-quality ones (Minix etc) and make them officially supported. Rest may be supported by community builds.

    Quote from astep

    If it is difficult to support all amlogic boxes, I would just concentrate on a number of high-quality ones (Minix etc) and make them officially supported. Rest may be supported by community builds.

    The problem is not with supporting multiple devices, this can be done quite easily in a unified fashion with no need for what you are suggesting, in-fact this is what we are already doing.

    The main problem with Amlogic devices is not something I can break down into laymans terms very well for the general user.

    GDPR-2 You can't expect a project done by 1 person in his free time and for free to be without issues and with super easy documentation, Wiki etc. Now you and afl1 joined developer team, we still don't have a wiki and installation instructions is still something I wrote.

    As for DTBs the process if fairly easy to understand if you know the internals of your box. With 100s of clone boxes on the market you cannot maintain a device tree for each and every device on the market, you have to leave some homework for the users.

    On the other hand I'm very happy to see members of this forum helping each other and gradually we have less and less people with installation issues. Most of them are "how do I run LE for the first time" which varies from box to box.

    Quote from kszaq

    GDPR-2 You can't expect a project done by 1 person in his free time and for free to be without issues and with super easy documentation, Wiki etc. Now you and afl1 joined developer team, we still don't have a wiki and installation instructions is still something I wrote.

    As for DTBs the process if fairly easy to understand if you know the internals of your box. With 100s of clone boxes on the market you cannot maintain a device tree for each and every device on the market, you have to leave some homework for the users.

    On the other hand I'm very happy to see members of this forum helping each other and gradually we have less and less people with installation issues. Most of them are "how do I run LE for the first time" which varies from box to box.


    kszaq I never said it was without issue and I have zero expectations, my response was merely in response the constant berating by senior members of LE of all things AML which is not helping anybody and it certainly isn't helping the project.

    As I said previously not everybody is as technically minded as ourselves, its impossible to expect everybody to understand the internals of their boxes and whilst I agree with you wholeheartedly that some homework and due-diligence is needed on the users part there is no central resource available for Amlogic devices in what I would call a user-friendly format.

    Quote from zorrua

    Hello,

    Any update about the official release?

    How is going?

    Kind regards.

    You can now build a bootable image using the official LE source, there are no official builds as of yet.

    I don't think you will see an official build until LE9 final releases start appearing which are some months away yet.