[Fascinate General] soba49:
Sorry ksizzle, looks like you won't get the last word after all.

Dredging up this thread won't be popular with everyone here. I mean no insult to the hard working developers here. If anyone needs proof that active development is being done, they needed only browse through the miles of updates going on constantly in their respective source controls at git hub. This issue has absolutely been liked into by competent eyes.

(speculation)

I think the brain power is here to do Samsung's job for them, but XDA devs have far less documentation resources here than they have. I'm not calling Samsung idiots, but signs point to software engineering compromises being made to rush product to market. They are clearly paying having residual problems from that rush. It is growing pains. They ought to be forced to clean up their code base or offer fewer models of equipment.

The best (quality) way forward would be to rewrite the RIL to what it should be, to the specification provided by Google, with at most trivial changes to the android framework to get a vanilla build of the latest latest running on our phones. Good luck with that.

What we have are provider (vzw) binaries (drivers, etc.) that don't quite fit Google's framework for android. I am not sure of the specifics of how it doesn't fit, but it could include issues with timing, data formatting, and even a completely different interface. Because these binaries do not play nice, it may not be possible to just wrap it into a proper interface without seriously showing down our phones.

We also have google's source for everything up to 2.3.

Finally, we have various source from Samsung. One problem with it, is key "proprietary" code is outright absent. This means to get it, we would have to make it. This would mean reverse engineering based on guesswork with the changes made to samsung's source versus google's OR reverse engineering the binaries available through decompilers, guesswork, and brute force testing. Samsung has the source for all of this of course and presumably lots of documentation from vzw about operating on their network, yet they are having problems getting a release out on time.

Of course it won't be easy, but the pieces we have may not be ready to do the job right.

We could continue the process of wedging malformed software into android, but I feel like that tactic is not going well for samsung and probably won't go well for us either.

(/speculation)

All of this is speculation because I have been too lazy to really look at it. It would take me a day to set up a proper build environment in ubuntu, a week to get to the point where I had some idea if what I was looking at, and a month before I had anything useful to say.

People are just hungry to hear something. I am convinced that if there were any practicality in attacking this issue head on, we would see it in motion.

This doesn't mean to be discouraged. I have read that htc was in the same place a year ago, and as fast as the android platform is moving, it isn't so unthinkable that our support will catch up. Nobody likes being behind, especially if it threatens revenues.

Swyped w/ XDA App. When in doubt, mumble.