The future of CyanogenMod ports

[Adam Farden]

Hi,

I'm leaving Mozilla as of this Thursday (31st March).

I was tasked with porting B2G to build on top of CyanogenMod so we could take advantage of the 150+ existing device ports. Today this works beautifully, I had a hand in at least 16 device ports, but with the shift to Connected Devices my work was deemed no longer necessary.

Perhaps you never even knew about this work, but you can at least thank me for the Rocket Browser logo...

Fortunately I'm not sitting idle and I'm jumping straight into full time employment elsewhere.

This means that I'll have very little time, if any, to keep the CM port properly maintained. Everything that I worked on can be found here: https://github.com/cm-b2g. Ideally I'd like to hand ownership of this GitHub organization to someone else to pick up and maintain.

Between now and Thursday I'll be finalizing things and polishing things up as best I can.

Please get in touch if you want to take over this work!

Adam

[lapi...@lavache.com]

Hi Adam,

First of all, thanks for your amazing work, it will be really helpful for the B2G project !

I think we have to take over the maintenance of this porting.
To be clear, I will not do it as I have to few time and knowledge.

And that's the point, do you have good doc to help us continue your work, or will you be available for questions ?
I mean, even if you was still available for a while, it's important to transfer the knowledge, to perpetuate the project. (Well, you know better than me how much it's important)

Lapineige.

[Pouf le cascadeur]

Hi Adam,

I am so sad about your departure :(.
Thank you a lot for your contribution, I think it's a great piece for the futur of B2G.
It would be great if you would come from time to time to see B2G's contributors and say an "Hi!" :).
Thank you again for this, for the Rocket Browser logo :), for all the work on Xperia devices...
And good luck for your futur employment.

eyome.

---

Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2016 01:24:23 +0200
Subject: The future of CyanogenMod ports
From: afa...@mozilla.com
To: dev-...@lists.mozilla.org

_______________________________________________ dev-fxos mailing list dev-...@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-fxos

[Vincent Cassé]

Hi Adam,

First of all, thanks for your work on Firefox OS porting!
Some month ago, I tried to found how install Firefox OS on phone and found only some docs for nexus 4. So all others smartphone owner can't try firefox OS. Now, more phone owners can try it because of you! Thanks :)

I understand you will lose time to maintain the projet. But I think this is important to continue it.
I think this it important to transfer the knowledge, as lapineige said, to continue the projet. Do you will have time to answer some questions from future mainteners? Can you summary some existing docs to build new porting?

I will try to have some time to read and test the documentation.

And also, if you want, I'm ready to join the github organization even I'm not sure to have the time to maintain it. I think also you can open the organization to multiple people to increase probability of success for a good transition.

Best regards,
Vincent

lapi...@lavache.com said

Le 29/03/16 21:09, Pouf le cascadeur a écrit :

[Adam Farden]

I'm not going far, just back to my other job shouting at soldiers and making them do push-ups all day.

The CM port is not inherently difficult or complicated, most of the work is finding how to make all the existing systems work together. It just needs someone who likes porting retail devices. Someone who knows the Android and CyanogenMod build systems well, plus knows just enough about all the different projects that make AOSP/CM/B2G to fix the conflicts. That's why I was asked to do it in the first place, I've been hacking on all three projects on several devices for many years.

The difficulty is simply the scale of AOSP, it takes a long time to know your way around this huge project. AOSP now has well over 500 projects in its manifest.

My documentation is already on MDN. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/Porting_Firefox_OS/Porting_on_CyanogenMod

It may seem brief but I built my CM port to do much of the hard work automatically. I wanted the guide to be as simple as possible for a CM device maintainer to get B2G working. Therefore the guide assumes your device already has a CM port and that you know how to build it. it's essentially a guide on how to transform your existing CM port to build on B2G. Porting a device from scratch was beyond the scope of my job.

If you want to know how I got B2G to build on CM you'll have to dive into the git history. I generally did a good job of adding comments to my bigger changes so you should be able to figure it out.

To be specific, most of the magic is in these repos:

https://github.com/cm-b2g/B2G

https://github.com/cm-b2g/b2g-manifest

https://github.com/cm-b2g/b2g-updates

https://github.com/cm-b2g/platform_build

https://github.com/cm-b2g/platform_vendor_cm-fake

[Juan Gómez]

Hey Adam!

It was reallly nice to work with you! I'd love to see you as a reference in device porting because we know how complex and tricky is sometimes and you have a far amount of experience there.
Having say that, I want to encourage all contributors interested in porting their devices to B2G, that use the Adam's work as a base. Porting a new device using Cyanogenmod could be done in half an our... Adam did it in like 15 minutes in front of me!.

So please, take a look at the documentation Adam was pointing to, and do not hesitate to ask anything here!

Thank you Adam! Hope to see you soon! :)

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 1:24 AM, Adam Farden <afa...@mozilla.com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm leaving Mozilla as of this Thursday (31st March).

I was tasked with porting B2G to build on top of CyanogenMod so we could take advantage of the 150+ existing device ports. Today this works beautifully, I had a hand in at least 16 device ports, but with the shift to Connected Devices my work was deemed no longer necessary.

Perhaps you never even knew about this work, but you can at least thank me for the Rocket Browser logo...

Fortunately I'm not sitting idle and I'm jumping straight into full time employment elsewhere.

This means that I'll have very little time, if any, to keep the CM port properly maintained. Everything that I worked on can be found here: https://github.com/cm-b2g. Ideally I'd like to hand ownership of this GitHub organization to someone else to pick up and maintain.

Between now and Thursday I'll be finalizing things and polishing things up as best I can.

Please get in touch if you want to take over this work!

Adam

_______________________________________________
dev-fxos mailing list
dev-...@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-fxos

--

___________________
Juan Gómez Mosquera
Platform Engineer
Mozilla Corporation
_AtilA_

[kskarthik]

Hello Adam, i am in charge of b2gos documentation. May i please know the status of this proposal. Is the ownership transferred ? If not, i am willing to take up charge. B2GOS Community is very active in porting.

[Valentin Schmitt]

On 05/13/2016 10:28 AM, kskarthik wrote:
> Is the ownership transferred ?

As far as I know, it wasn't.

> If not, i am willing to take up charge. B2GOS Community is very active
in porting.

Awesome! \o/


--
Valentin Schmitt
Community Coordinator
IRC: ens0
GitHub/Twitter/Telegram: @ensowhat

[itan...@gmail.com]

Hello，
I'm a fan of B2GOS from China. The other day, I noticed the "cm-b2g" that you had maintain the code on Github. I want to compile it to my “Wileyfox Swift”. But before compile, I want to know if the source code based on "b2g/cm-13.0-ZNH0E" can be used normally？

[itan...@gmail.com]

Hello，Adam
I'm a fan of Firefox OS from China. The other day, I noticed the "cm-b2g" that you had maintain the code on Github. I want to compile it to my “Wileyfox Swift”. But before compile, I want to know if the source code based on "b2g/cm-13.0-ZNH0E" can be used normally？

[Mad Billy]

Hi itan...

Did you have any success with building B2GOS for your Wileyfox Swift? If you're interested, there are still people working on projects similar to B2GOS, based on it, join us:
- IRC: irc.mozilla.org #b2g
- Telegram: huit.re/ServonkTelegram
- Discourse: discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/b2g-os-participation
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/FireFoxOS/
- Mailing list: lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-fxos (google group: huit.re/nKxnjPM4)

The people in those groups can probably also help you with cm-b2g, or know who to ask.

Cheers :)