[Nook Color Android Development] fattire:
An explanation...

So every few months it seems someone posts a message starting with something like "this is rubbish" along with the sentiment you just expressed, accusations of ego and being a jerk, and all that... and so we have to attempt to re-explain the reasoning for this post-no-builds request. So I guess I'm going to make a go of it again...

The policy is in the form of a request by the devs to the community to not post builds for several reasons-- one is practical, another philosophical.

First, the practical--

I understand why you would think this, but my experience has been quite the opposite. When ROMs were released before they were ready, and of course there were inevitable and known issues, my PM box exploded with complaints and questions and bug reports that could be handled either through (1) a polite but time consuming response or (2) ignoring them. I've never been one to do #2, which means a lot of time is spent discussing bugs rather than working on fixing them.. Sure, I can always choose to ignore these messages, but that leads to the reputation of developers (and for the sake of argument I'll count myself in that category for the moment) having "ego"s.

See the name of this forum category up top? Nook Color Android Development. I don't go to a automotive repair forum and whine about not getting free rides across town, y'know. And why don't I? Because as well all know, mechanics have such egos. :rolleyes: You may also notice the title of this thread starts with [DEV] (that stands for "Development", BTW. BTW stands for By The Way, by the way) and if you keep reading, the rest is CM11 Work-In-Progress. Not CM11 It's Done Come Download It.

I mean... you just said, quote, "The majority of people in a dev sub-forum... do not want to learn about development." Don't see anything wrong with that? (And no, I don't think the ellipses misrepresents what you said.. I'm just compressing.)

Your perception of what the "vast majority of people want" is irrelevant, but it's also wrong, from my experience. There are very, VERY few people on this forum who have expressed no desire to learn development.

Au contraire. How wrong you are. When they think they've bricked their devices, they care. Oh, yes, they care. Perhaps you haven't had the pleasurable experience of chatting with someone who has gotten in over their head, coming to you with the expectation that you're going to fix their problem... right now. Maybe you don't deal often with panicked users who for some reason were under the impression that it was perfectly safe to run an experimental build, and who, if you don't give them full attention when it's convenient to them, will accuse developers generally of being mean jerks who sabotaged their systems. People whose negative experiences will make them hate hacking their devices and everyone involved with it.

Cuz I have.

Again, you are wrong wrong wrong. Number one-- the "few people in here" who have requested that builds not be posted are not some brutal dictatorial minority-- they're the ones who have put thousands upon thousands of hours over four years to bring Gingerbread, Honeycomb, ICS, Jellybean and now KitKat to the NC and make an old piece of hardware STILL in 2014 be able to run a cutting-edge modern OS. This has involved writing tons of original code from SD card translators, build tools, soft key integration custom and heavily modified hardware drivers, bootloader menus, updating to new major kernel versions, etc. etc. This work has been taken and used by for-profit companies who have made literally millions reselling these ports.

So if these "few people" simply have a request (for the good of the community, as you'll see) to not post builds until they are ready, it would be nice if that were respected.

As for your suspicion that those "n00bs have not contributed significantly to the real work needing to be done to make ROM work", this is where you're really, REALLY wrong. First of all, everyone starts out as a "n00b". 90% of the NC contributors, including myself, including Dalingrin, basically had zero experience with embedded devices before we started with the NC. When I started, there was almost no instruction on how to build this stuff. Which is why I made sure years ago to meticulously document all the steps needed to build, and to write a how-to guide, to create as well as attract more people.

And it worked. Turns out that there were a few thousand people (and I know the number because I could track the number of views, which were in the tens of thousands) who wanted to learn to build. Many of those people have become developers themselves, not only for the NC but for other devices. While I don't want to waste time helping people fix problems that have resulted from building a not-yet-ready ROM, I'm more than happy to devote that time to helping someone *build* themselves... because in doing so they acquire the knowledge for them to fix any problems they encounter in the future.

The post-no-builds request creates a tiny incentive for those who were thinking about learning to actually doing it-- it removes the "I'll just click here and maybe get around to learning later" disincentive. It's voluntary, but 99.99% of people on this forum are respectful of the learning process to participate, and the community has attracted many, many new developers as a result.

Many of the things that have made the NC community awesome-- EMMC-SD tools, bugfixes, enhancements, and dedicated devs, have come up from knowing nothing because they took the time to learn to build on their own. Although many of them are building on other devices these days, I'm sure a lot of them are still here, years later. One old-timer, a once-with-no-experience fanboy who ended up making some major contributions to ICS, just poked his nose in with a post a couple days ago.

I invite anyone else who's learned a thing or two as a result of this policy to step up and testify, bruthas and sistas!

I said there was a practical reason, but the second reason for the no-builds request is more philosophical. Let me explain.

When the NookColor came out in 2010- it was sold as an eReader. Its capability as a full tablet running Google's market, which we now all take for granted, was NOT supported by its manufacturer. It was running a hobbled version of Eclair (Android 2.1) and had very limited capability. Android was not as established as it is today-- and "hacking" devices was seen as something only some kind of elite cyberninjas could do.

The philosophical goal of encouraging people to build Android for themselves was (and is) to establish control of computers in you the customer/owner/citizen rather than let it be dictated by industry/government what you may or may not do with your own devices. By building your own operating system from scratch, you are empowering yourself- you are gaining a more tactile relationship with your technology, understanding its raw potential, its security, privacy, social implications in a more intuitive sense than you would by reading some article in a magazine, and you're also seeing how you can do much more with an ereader (or any technology) than perhaps the manufacturer, or service provider, or government, or whomever wants you to know you can do. You're seeing how you can make technology work for your interests, bend it to your will, Neo- from-the-Matrix style.

You're also having fun, hopefully. And when you get that first hot, fresh build out of the oven... it feels really great.

Bum-bum-BUMMMMMM. Well, maybe you're right. Maybe there are egos at play. But I hope that the imposition of our egos is at least in service of everyone else's interests. That is-- I, in my infinite selfish wisdom, *want* people to learn for themselves, to be empowered, and to not rely on benevolence of more powerful institutions to determine what you can do with your computers. I'm also motivated selfishly because experience has taught me that many people who learn stuff are excited by teaching as well, and so just as I learned from others and passed it on via the howtos and the CM wiki, etc, so others are passing it and helping each other.. and hopefully someone who knows more than I do (ie, just about everyone) will be inspired to teach me more stuff too. So yeah, a big ego fest.

The request to build for yourselves is a request to learn something, to engage with your technology for the benefit of understanding that, just as I learned from playing around and experimenting, you can learn too.

I take the suggestion "there's egos at play" with special curiosity, given the experience so many who want to learn have on other forums where ONLY a binary is available, with no source provided at all and with all the consequential bricking and chaos that results. In this thread, source code is given as it's being developed. Those who are able to build can try it out, and the fact that they built it makes it more likely they will be able to handle problems. Those who can't build are provided with all the tools and information they need to do so. When everyone agrees a build is ready and the go-ahead consensus is reached, it is usually one of the learning builders who ends up having the experience of creating scripts and tools to build unofficial releases.

Occasionally some yahoo comes along and posts a build prematurely (it happens w/grouper all the time after I post CM code). They immediately get 999 "Thanks" and "great job!" and stuff... sometimes they acknowledge others who brought up the repos, other times they don't. IYeah, it's annoying, but I can't do much about it, and really, who gives a crap who gets the "glory" on XDA anyway...

Well whoopity-doo, you're quite a rebel there, cowboy. Hope that rush of adrenaline feels awesome as you power up that bad-boy, knowing you stumbled onto a way of ignoring a kindly request to voluntarily learn something for yourself. Maybe it does feel good. You get to test a new experimental OS! Woo!

But I can promise you, it's nowhere near as serotonin-dumping pleasurable or rewarding as if you had built it yourself for the very first time.

So congrats on cheating yourself.

Old meme, but still says it nicely...