[question] what keeps jolla from supporting 3rd party patches?

asked 2015-02-23 19:17:35 +0200

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ive seen a lot of threads now in whish someone requests a feature and a responce is right away a link to openrepos where some implemented the exact feature. why wont jolla integrate this stuff? i mean its there, and obviously it works. it might need some tests before used in native releases but whats the problem?

those requests are mostly simple things like keyboard layouts or further options/settings for stuff. and i dont really like fiddling with my jolla since its my one and only mobile device and i rely on it.

but my question is what keeps jolla from integrating this? licence issues? not enough work force for testing / integrating? maybe design decisions? but i really dont think sailfish has too many options or seems overloaded anywhere. what do you guys think?

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Comments

2

Good question!

DavidJ ( 2015-02-23 20:23:06 +0200 )edit
2

Indeed (ah, too much SGC and Teal'c for me it seems) a good question! It has bugged me that when I search for this and that the answer usually is OpenRepo this and developer mode that.

I have no idea how the licensing works in OpenRepos but I do know that everything posted here is usable for Jolla as they wish. I don't know if they follow the basic questions that thoroughly, or do they just read their postings/requests. Some might be missed due to poor tagging/head lining etc.

But to the question, I do find it funny because it seems it doesn't take that much time to implement the patches which are numerous in OpenRepos, so why not use them - at least to some extent. And again, kudos for this post! :)

raketti ( 2015-02-23 21:40:53 +0200 )edit
3

I don't have any insights into how SailfishOS development is organized internally, but from my experience with other projects, I can imagine a reason: even though solutions and workarounds exist and work, it is not a good idea to just merge them into your own codebase; it often needs more work to integrate a feature into the user interface appropriately (i.e. in a way that is flexible enough for power users, yet not confusing for newbies) than to develop the feature itself. Also, testing, code review and eventually refactoring would be needed before adopting third party code, to avoid a messy codebase, dysfunction or even malfunction. That said, I'd also appreciate if it was easier for the community to contribute to SailfishOS.

tokaru ( 2015-02-24 11:50:10 +0200 )edit

@tokaru I agree on your points and I know it takes time to add something to the base, so while we have these unofficial patches etc. It might be reasonable to think that if Jolla will pull some of them in to the OS, it will take at least 2-3 release cycles to do so.

raketti ( 2015-02-24 11:55:21 +0200 )edit

There's a patch for low bitrate mp3 playback issue, but it has not been included (already missed couple of updates). I think in this case patent licensing is the reason they are careful and will just pull fixes from the package maintainers and not fix anything themselves.

alloj ( 2015-02-24 13:43:32 +0200 )edit