Announcement
*** Announcement *** Announcement *** Announcement *** Announcement ***
Hi all,
I take the opportunity today to announce some big, significant changes for the upcoming future with immediate effect.
The story is short: In the past months I realized the total work for providing 10 active (and many more silently maintained) kernels is becoming too much for my personal work/professional work/life balance.
Thinking about it I realized the biggest part of the work does not come from actual development itself but the whole administrative overhead like support, maintaining change logs everywhere, thread titles, being very reactive in forum threads, answering many mail requests for help for development etc.
So I came to the conclusion I have two options in the end:
a) I will quit kernel development officially and that's it
b) I have to do significant changes
For the time being I decided to go with option b.
This option comes with a lot of changes, painful changes for some, but this is how life goes.
Everyone not fine with these changes is happily encouraged to leave the boat and search for alternatives. We haven an open market and community, so there will be for sure enough alternatives.
So here the list of things that will change in the future with immediate effect as of today:
1) As-is mentality
- The kernels and the config app will in future come as-is, with all bugs or side effects and I might or might not change it-
- It is your personal responsibility to use or not use my work.
- I do not at all care if the kernel or the app does not run or has side effects on your specific custom rom, I am not using these roms, so it is your problem. Same applies for issues caused by xposed usage, other scripts, other configuration apps, other rooting methods etc.
2) Development pace
- The pace will be significantly reduced, I am not providing something like regular updates anymore.
- Updates will only come when I cosider them being important. Asking for updates will be ignored.
- In general I have the opinion, my kernels are well equipped and I am not planning to add big new features.
- I will not justify nor discuss why I put in or remove functionalities
3) Bug reporting
You can and should report bugs, but I will
- most probably not respond to or comment the report at all
- read the reports from time to time and try to reproduce it on my device
- only look into a fix if I can reproduce it on my side
- exceptionally take the liberty to decide not to fix something or even look into it
- not respond to follow-ups on reported issues in general
- ignore all bug reports that require a log file and the log file is not a debug info file created within Boeffla-Config
4) New feature requests
You can still bring in your ideas for new features, but I will
- not respond to them or comment them
- based on whether I like it I will put it on my internal list of todos
- never respond with any ETAs
5) Reduce admin overhead
- I will not post change logs anymore in the forums, only links to it (also in new kernel announcements)
- I will not change forum thread titles anymore to update version information, they will be generic - watch my homepage, Twitter or the threads content for updates
- in future I might decide to only announce new versions on Twitter and not in forums anymore
- I will be not that active anymore in forum threads, while I am still regularly reading them
- I will only join general discussions when I have too much free time
6) Other
- I will, for the time being, not take on additional devices for official kernel work
- I will consider dropping one or two devices completely if required (would be the Galaxy S3 and S5)
- I will consider dropping the OOS kernel for the OnePlus One as this is a niche product only
- I will only sometimes respond on help requests for development anymore, if you get no answer, accept it
While many of these points might be painful for someone or maybe even unacceptable, this is the life.
And it will and should help to foster a strong user community in the threads that help each other and remove the hard dependency on me.
I will see how that goes and evolves over the next few weeks. If all goes as I hope, and my work/life balance comes back, I will keep it.
If that is not paying off, I might consider leaving the arena completely as well.
Thanks for supporting the new approach.
I will not discuss it at all, so please just read and accept it.
Cheers
Andi
