End user: How can we help?

[Joshua]

First of all, I want to thank you for seeing the blaring hole that is multi-tasking in Android and fixing the problem.  I've seen so much praise for Corner stone in the various rom forums that include cornerstone.

As an end user that believes in open source projects I want to be helpful.  I understand that Cornerstone is in its early stages of development and bugs are to be expected. 

Currently I am using a Team EOS rom for the Xoom.  Cornerstone was included with their roms but they do not offer bug fixes or development beyond compiling Cornerstone into the rom.  I have seen issues specific to the cornerstone builds of their roms but fixes are not currently offered by the rom devs.  In my case, the two issues that I have seen are problems related to inconsistent wifi conectivity and problems pairing with bluetooth devices that require pairing confirmation.  

As an end user, would Cornerstone prefer us to submit bugs that we come across? If so, what kind of information would you like us to include (maybe logcats etc)?  Up until now, I haven't seen any developers post questions on this forum and so I have been hesitant to post issues that I have found while using Cornerstone.

[mk]

Great post.  This brings up a very real problem- there have been several ROMs that incorporate CS, but I have seen very little actual development of CS.  I assumed that once the source code was opened and devs got comfortable with it, that there would be a stronger development community.  I think perhaps there needs to be a better definition of the level of support and development Onskreen will provide devs and users in the future. Is Onskreen going to soley provide maintenance and bug fix support, or will Onskreen work with the development community to bring feature enhancements to CS?

Also, I myself have made some tweaks (albeit minor) on my github CS fork and would like my commits to be merged upstream.  Are you accepting pull requests? 

[onhsnm]

Glad to hear you are enjoying Cornerstone. If you have questions about Cornerstone or a specific ROM, the forum is the best place to ask. We don't have every ROM that has included Cornrestone on the various devices, so our developers might not be able to offer specific guidance on the problem, but we will be able to offer higher level guidance on what is going on. For example, the network issues (wifi, bluetooth) that you are seeing in your ROM are not likely caused by Cornerstone. Those sound like driver issues that are ROM specific. Also, via the forums, perhaps another user will be able to chime in and help out.

If you have questions that turn out to be Cornrestone bugs, the place to report them is on the GitHub project site. Please include details of:
- Version of Cornerstone code
- Custom ROM that you are using
- Device
- Any relevant logcat

An important thing to note is that since Cornerstone is included with various ROMs by developers, there is a high probability that the issue is not reproducible by us and only exists on that ROM. To avoid tracking down tons of phantom bugs we do ask that you differentiate as best you can between what is ROM dependent and what might be caused by Cornerstone. For example, the network issues are most likely ROM dependent, while an issue like the layout of the screen with multiple apps open misbehaving would be more likely caused by Cornerstone.

On Friday, April 6, 2012 11:28:20 PM UTC-7, Joshua wrote:

[onhsnm]

Our goals when open sourcing Cornerstone included supporting the community to contribute new features and enhancements to Cornerstone. To that end, Onskreen will support developers that want to dig into the core code and improve the product. We also knew this would take some time. The core Cornerstone code is pretty complex and manipulating the Android framework correctly is even more complex.

Up to now, the only real contributions we have seen are in the Cornerstone Settings Application. Which makes sense because it is a self contained APK that is straightforward to manipulate. Other than that a few of the ROM creators have tried but not yet been successful in really digging into the core code. We are aware of a couple of teams at OEMs and chip vendors that are a bit further along in that process. Our goal is to support the community of developers (both at OEMs and independent) to be successful in contributing meaningful enhancements to Cornerstone.

To help we included extensive commenting to explain the more complex or opaque implementation details. Any questions about those should be directed to this forum so we can elaborate and it is archived for others.

We are accepting pull requests. I can't comment on your specific changes but submit a request and a developer can take a look for sure.

[Joshua]

Thank you for the response!