CM9 News from CyanogenMod Google+

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Last night, +Steve Kondik took to twitter to vent a little bit:

"CM has been getting a lot of crap lately for taking so long with a release. Guess what? It's not that easy. We don't just call something stable unless we mean it. *Also, RC1 is soon!* The most stable devices will get the RC first. The system we've put in place should allow other devices to catch up quickly. More details later this week "

Now to combat the obvious questions:

# As Steve stated, this will not be for all CM9 supported devices. The Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus can be considered safe bets, but the final list won't be available until release day.

# As always, the proper day of release is difficult/impossible to predict, but we anticipate a code freeze going in place tomorrow at the earliest.

# Yes, this means we will actively be running two separate RC phases (CM7 and CM9). Bug's should be reported to the issue tracker once the release is made, not in the comments on our posts.

# There has been a lot of talk surrounding Linaro in CM. While CM 9.0 won't ship with all the patches on gerrit, quite a few of them are already incorporated and others are sane enough that they will likely be there. There are still some issues surrounding the updated gcc used for the Linaro patches that don't play nice with AOSP.

# Nexus One: For the time being, the N1 will not be supported. We can get it to build/boot/run, but the hacks required break Google's CTS, so until that is rectified, you won't see any build with CM's official stamp of approval.

CM9 News

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And from a followup a few hours later:

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+Ricardo Cerqueira sat down with XDA recently for a developer interview

To piggy back on our comment about the N1 and CTS, Ricardo describes why we don't just shrug off that requirement.

Because it opened a can of worms that can’t be closed again. Getting it to work needed some very ugly workarounds that directly go against Google’s compatibility document for ICS. An app developer targeting ICS as a minimal version for his apps has the right to expect some functionality to be guaranteed on a device that claims to be ICS, that wasn’t (and isn’t) true for ICS builds with these hacks. That’s one the main reasons CM9 does not officially include a bunch of devices that are “working.”

...and some users understand that, but a lot don’t, and they’ll submit error reports on those apps, or they’ll rate it badly at the Play store. This is not a hypothetical scenario, it has happened whether we like it or not, asked for it or not, CM’s userbase is large enough to matter, even if you don’t count derivatives. We have a responsibility not to cause that kind of grief to app developers and we did. With all the mostly bull**** talk about fragmentation, we actively contributed to a break in the platform, no matter how small. That’s not a good thing :X People SHOULD know these builds contain hacks, but you’ve surely realized by now that they don’t
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Originally Posted by dookie23

....so until that is rectified, you won't see any build with CM's official stamp of approval.

so.... is that ever gonna get rectified

Originally Posted by charlie_su1986

so.... is that ever gonna get rectified

I wonder what are the hacks he mentioned in the post. Was it the hboot hack, m2sd hack or swap partition...etc?

what is all the fuss about CM9 not releasing a rom officially when we have quite a few talented devs that have already given us the choice of running a near perfect ICS Rom on our nexus one?

EDIT: BCM offers CM9 features, AOKP offers us users the choice of AOKP features and texasice rom has a twist of its own features to. I do not see a problem with CM not releasing an official rom

Originally Posted by Kannibalism

what is all the fuss about CM9 not releasing a rom officially when we have quite a few talented devs that have already given us the choice of running a near perfect ICS Rom on our nexus one?

EDIT: BCM offers CM9 features, AOKP offers us users the choice of AOKP features and texasice rom has a twist of its own features to. I do not see a problem with CM not releasing an official rom

Don't get me wrong, I love seeing the talented devs make awesome progress on kang'ing CM9 and things are coming together nicely. What I am getting at is not whether Cyanogenmod is releasing a CM9 rom officially for the Nexus One, but it's what Ricardo Cerqueira said about the hacks breaking Google CTS. This could mean that apps might not run or worse yet, FC's for no reason.

Now, the real questions are, what are these hacks Ricardo was talking about and is that gonna get rectified?

the hacks they talk about could be small stuff like ta camera fix etc since vendors do not always release new drivers.I would say that the nexus one is using a few hacks for drivers in order to make everything work better

I suspect it's a combination, both messing with HBOOT partition sizes (which is not a *bad* thing, but involves a lot more risk than just flashing a new ROM) and the nasty driver hacks that the poor dev's have had to do to try to working around the lack of a Broadcom driver, since they saw fit to release neither a driver nor sufficient documentation. It's hard to see how either could be overcome for an "official" CM9 release. I feel like it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem; with sufficient dev attention things could probably be brought into acceptable shape, but unofficial ports will never have sufficient dev attention.

Disclaimer: I really appreciate all the work that's been done by everyone on all the community ROMs. It's a hard, often thankless job, whether you're debugging mystery driver issues on an older phone or trying to coordinate a release for dozens of different devices with angry, impatient fans. While I'd love to have an official, flawless ICS ROM, at least we get more love from the community than we did from Google

Originally Posted by decoherent

I suspect it's a combination, both messing with HBOOT partition sizes (which is not a *bad* thing, but involves a lot more risk than just flashing a new ROM) and the nasty driver hacks that the poor dev's have had to do to try to working around the lack of a Broadcom driver, since they saw fit to release neither a driver nor sufficient documentation. It's hard to see how either could be overcome for an "official" CM9 release. I feel like it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem; with sufficient dev attention things could probably be brought into acceptable shape, but unofficial ports will never have sufficient dev attention.

Disclaimer: I really appreciate all the work that's been done by everyone on all the community ROMs. It's a hard, often thankless job, whether you're debugging mystery driver issues on an older phone or trying to coordinate a release for dozens of different devices with angry, impatient fans. While I'd love to have an official, flawless ICS ROM, at least we get more love from the community than we did from Google

I agree with this post i would put the blame on google for not pushing the vendors for the broadcom drivers since android is open source after all but once again great works by our devs and thanks for letting us experience the latest versions of android on our devices

EDIT: i must admit that i have better devices to use than the nexus one but the community keeps me coming back for more

Sent from my Nexus One using xda premium