December 2008 Archives

Hey SHR users!

As a lot of people asked me the last couple of days what was new in the
latest image, I decided to give it a shot more "officially", in order
to be able to avoid repeating myself :-).

So here's a quick list of the major changes from last week:

Thanks to Rod Whitby, who, a while ago, setup the buildhost for us, and did an excellent work with the FSO/SHR makefile, we had a skeleton
to help developers to build our distro.

With his blessings, we forked the project as we needed to be able to patch OpenEmbedded, especially for the fastboot patches, and for some issues we have. Thanks to Klaus Kurzmann, the build process, based on the SHR Makefile is now saner, and applies our OpenEmbedded patches automatically.

This build process also gets a specific revision of the OE tree, thus implying it's more deterministic. You won't have discrepancies
between two builds with the same Makefile, and same revision specified
in the Makefile.

We included fastboot patches, as made by the OM Optimization Team. This sped up the boot time quite a lot, indeed. Thanks go to Klaus
Kurzmann for this work.

We unfortunately had to remove some stuff (namely exquisite, the e bootsplash), as they were too power consuming. This lead to so many
changes that it implies a reflash.

As we worked in haste, our package names became quite weird. We ended up having the package revision specified twice in the names, thus
being redundant.

We changed that, in order to be coherent with OE naming conventions for an ulterior commit, and that came with its lot of problems, that is
to say : reflash implied! :-)

A phone call log functionnality was implemented in ophonekitd, thanks to ptitjes. Now, ophonekitd, our phone daemon, logs the call events to a sqlite database.

Thanks to Tasn, pyphonelog is now able to read from this database, thus displaying the full log.

Due to the lack of keystrokes in X for AUX and Power, we weren't able, until now, to associate actions to the buttons. Now, we can (yes, we can! ). Hence, the power button now triggers illume menu, allowing you to suspend, shutdown, or go to the Home screen for instance.

As to the AUX button, it now triggers illume "Simple Lock" feature.

Thanks to quickdev, who did a great deal of work on his UI,
libframeworkd-phonegui-efl will be upgraded in a short time. This
implies that the UI has been redesigned to conform to some users'
requests, and comes with more functionnalities (such as call from
contact list while in the dialer, send an SMS to contact, etc...).

The upgrade is currently available in unstable, and will be available on testing soon. Testers needed! :-)

As some users pointed out the problem, the settings app lacks functionnalities. For instance, we need to be able to set the
brightness in a sensible (and persistent) way. We also need an UI to be
able to read/modify/generate rules for oeventsd (frameworkd).

Help needed for that, guys, but that's the way we want to go.

As illume and E in general go on and on, more functionnalities are available and bugs are fixed. We will need, in the nearest future, to
bump up the revisions of all of these packages. We will do so in
unstable, and pour it into testing when the time is right.
For that kind of thing, though, we need to be able to ship a
configuration adapted to the revision of E we'll be using. Testers
needed here too :-)