Someone just pointed this ot me, and no time to read but..
As always -- pnd is version 1.0; It (and libpnd) is very much by design to work well, and be replaced; a lot of it can be replaced under the hood, without breaking anything for the user, to improve over time. (Historical note -- we devs got dev-pcbs to work on and figured we had a couple of _weeks_ to build all of this and get a working firmware going. We actually got dev boards after the date the units were supposed to be shipping to people
We had an unstable kernel, a lot of bad drivers, and a lot of stuff didnt' work or didn't perform well enough.. we've talked about this in IRC and message boards to death for anyone wanting to know more history, but suffice to say .. pnd system works great, despite the constraints we had. See all our happy users
But as always, day one, it was planend a lot of it could be changed up. It works great, and it has problems. Gosh darn, a 1.0 thign has issues, news at 11
v2.0 is not yet defined, and as always, we have firmware-dev mailing list and so on to discuss things. Coming out of the blue in random board threads isn't going to make anything happen
http://pandorawiki.org/Firmware_governance
Historically we have very few peopel coming out with patches or ideas; you were one of the great ones, and you actualyl put in some patches (thanks!) .. but you took off
Stick around, help make thigns better
To wit -- the requirements of users are vast, and one of the big ones is not to break everything thats already there; further, most people like to toss out 'this is the best' without considering all the implications. (A lot of ideas commonly break when you start discussing multiple apps in one file, multiple simultaneous runs of the same file, mutliple users on one pandora runing the same file, etc. Ask sebt3 how hard its been to rewrite pnd_run.sh.. dozens of subtle oddities pop out
I still like the binfmt idea as one interesting option (though it fails many of the requirements I just listed) -- make a pnx format related to pnx, where the file is just executable outright
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laying out a pnd like /usr/.... etc hierarchy is an interesting new twist idea. Mount and overlay and xfce just detects it .. hmrf.
Some issues mind you -- auto documentation while the app is unmounted wouldn't work there; categorization wouldn't work in a standard way, so you'd haev to do it in filenames as you say, whcih is pretty guly. (What if its in several categories.. getting really messy with your tags there. But an interesting idea anyway.
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Hey dflemstr, you're around, cool
Join firmware-dev and kick thigns up again, its not too happening, we need more action
Your idea above is very different than your previous 'pnd sucks, it shoudl be like _this_" ideas. Its obviously a hard problem, since even you come up with multiple different 'bests'.
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Let me make a quick summary -- it is a _hard_ problem to come up with an ideal solution, since ideal varies by person. The whole system _is_ up for change, with gatekeepings being our community; no one person can just come up with 'this is best' and be right, it takes discussion and debate; a lot of good ideas will just not be workable, but a lot of ideas shoudl go in for v2, and ideally, can be back compatible with v1 so as not to break everything for the user.
I'm sick of seeing a few people coming out once in awhile (not sticking around to actualyl achieve change) and saying 'this sucks, heres some patches, lets discuss it and come up with something'. Its _easy_ for any topic in the world to say 'this government sucks, I'd do better!", but to actually say "this and this, lets discuss it over the next month or two, maybe we can all come together" is hard. Usually its "this is a great idea, but anyone who disagreess with me is wrong" (#openpandora I'm looking at you
Anyway, the whole stage is open .. firmware 2 ("Y") is not yet well defined, now is the time to discuss these things.
HF5 is nice and stable; HF6 is more patches; after than, Firmware 2 .. the sky is the limit!
So join the mailing list, and lets have positive discussions..
jeff
And I'm having twins in a couple months, so the process is more important than ever .. we have a few more bodies helping with the firmware now, and ownign the commitership.