Samsung Woos Developers As It Eyes Tizen Expansion Beyond Smartphones

New submitter Manish Singh writes: Why is Samsung, the South Korean technology conglomerate which has the tentpole position in Android, becoming increasinglu focused on its homegrown operating system Tizen? At its annual developer summit this week, the company announced new SDKs for smartwatches, smart TVs, and smartphones, and also shared its future roadmap.

Comments

Tizen? Don't make me laugh

[StevenMaurer]

I worked on a contract in which an auto manufacturer was trying to use that abomination, and we could never even get the source to compile. Literally a year later, it came out that Samsung was trying to use both git/gerrit and Perforce as version control for it, mixed between different teams:

Time went by and Bad Things started to appear. Git/gerrit was official in some teams, but Perforce was official in other teams (even working on the same component). Some patches went there, some there. The management finally decided Perforce code should be used as THE source for building OS images. Again, they only forgot to tell everyone else to stop using git

Both repositories diverged to the point of being almost incompatible. Issues in Perforce code were given to git teams, which resulted in a litany of WTFs. After all, there’s not many things more fun than being tasked with fixing a bug in code that you physically don’t have. ASAP. Meetings took place, arrangements were made to rectify the situation. Months later, the situation is still the same.

One implication was code review process. With gerrit in place, that was a non-issue. But the Korean teams didn’t (and still don’t) understand the notion of code review and pushed everything directly to the repo. The quality of some patches was so bad that enforcing code review became top priority for non-Korean teams. Finally, a solution was developed – MS Word based code review. Each changeset needs to be attached to a bug in the tracker. Each bug can have a Word document attached with a request for code review. That document is a three pages long form with information so useless, nobody even wants to read it. At the end there’s a place for copy-pasting a diff for each file changed, with the explanation why. Reviewers are supposed to fill a Word form with details about which line they comment on and what their issue with it is.

Submitting a patch, clicking through the awful issue tracker and filling the form takes literal hours. All this because using git with gerrit was too tough. Fortunately, the review form has fields listing times taken by various steps in fixing a bug. Maybe someday someone will read how long pushing the code actually takes.

No, they won’t.

Luckily, that contract was short term. But because I put it on my resume, I got a few head-hunters inquiring about it. Quickly though, interest waned. Not hard to see why...

Re:Tizen? Don't make me laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're posting links to thedailywtf, let's not forget this one.