Contributions and conflict-prone areas

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

I've been looking at many Android contributions recently, which gives
be some good visibility over the difficulties in merging changes all
the way upstream into Google's internal tree.

Generally speaking, at the moment the gap between AOSP and Google's
internal master tree is unusually small, and that allows a very large
majority of contributions to merge without conflicts.

By looking at many changes, I spotted 3 areas where merges don't go
smoothly. Those areas are Bluetooth, Email, and Location, and most
changes related to those cause merge problems. Digging a bit, those
look like they've been refactored quite heavily in Google's internal
tree, which causes the conflicts. For anyone considering to contribute
in any of those 3 areas. I recommend waiting until the next major
release (and I don't have any ETA for it).

From what I've seen, merges are uneventful in all other areas of the
Android tree.

Thanks,
JBQ

--
Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru
Technical Lead, Android Open Source Project, Google.

Questions sent directly to me that have no reason for being private
will likely get ignored or forwarded to a public forum with no further
warning.

[Manuel Naranjo]

JBQ,

> By looking at many changes, I spotted 3 areas where merges don't go
> smoothly. Those areas are Bluetooth, Email, and Location, and most
> changes related to those cause merge problems. Digging a bit, those
> look like they've been refactored quite heavily in Google's internal
> tree, which causes the conflicts. For anyone considering to contribute
> in any of those 3 areas. I recommend waiting until the next major
> release (and I don't have any ETA for it).

Any chances any of this changes on the Bluetooth side are related to
Bluetooth Low Energy? I've been working on implementing a Open Bluetooth
Low Energy[1] which installs on any ICS or JB rooted device, and doesn't
require any patching on BlueZ. Which I was thinking on starting
contributing soon, my implementation is online[2] as well. It provides
only an LE client, allowing Android devices work as server would require
hacking into BlueZ that even though I had done plenty of times before is
hard, and beyond my goal right now.

Regards,
Manuel

[1] http://code.google.com/p/broadcom-ble/
[2] https://github.com/manuelnaranjo/android-btle

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

I don't know the exact nature of the refactorings, at least not to the
point where I can discern specific features, and definitely not in a
way that I could communicate about anyway. What I know is that many
files in those areas have moved or been changed a lot, and that causes
merge conflicts.

At my level, Android is a very broad code base, and there's only very
little of it that I know with a bit of depth. Bluetooth, Email and
Location definitely aren't in that category.

JBQ

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