CyanogenMOD crew drops a friendly public service announement

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been wondering what the deal is with the CyanogenMOD crew and when we can expect to see some more CM9 builds hit the airwaves or more devices being supported. It’s a good thing these guys know how badly we are fiending for that AOSP Ice Cream Sandwich goodness, otherwise we’d be left in the cold, crying to ourselves and repeating the words, “ETA”.

The CM team took to its Google+ page last night to update the community on the current status of the project. Here’s what they had to say:

It’s been a busy week for us behind the scenes, but we’ve been pretty quiet on the public front.

CM7.2 RC1 bugs are still being accepted to the bug tracker, and we are working on the eventual RC2.
For CM9, work continues to not only forward port features from CM7, but improve upon them in terms of functionality and code. A lot of CM7 features worked well, but weren’t what you would call ‘clean’ code. We are taking this opportunity to address that situation.

Features on gerrit with high activity this week are LED Notifications http://goo.gl/4MPe2and the much loved Phone Tweaks http://goo.gl/hsXc0. As you can see, the review process for these is much longer than usual, to address the code as well as ensuring the features are intuitive from a functionality standpoint. No point in having features people don’t know how to use or are outright confusing.

Along this same path, we hit a bit of a eureka moment this week. A lot of you out there are skilled in various coding languages and want to help out, but don’t know where to start. Some may even have a great feature and code to back it up, but may not feel certain it will be accepted. Who wants to spend hours devoted to a feature, only to have us turn it down in gerrit review? That’s not pleasant.

To address this, we are drafting documentation to help new contributors join in. We’ll have more on this topic from +Jef Oliver in the near future. In the meantime, if you are an interested developer who fits into that “don’t know what to begin on” category, feel free to stop by #cyanogenmod -dev on Freenode. We’d love to talk to you and get your input on how to improve our upcoming documentation and maybe point you in the right direction.

Edit For those of you who can’t make it to IRC, we also have the devrel (at)cyanogenmod.com email address, should you have a code/patch/idea that you would like vetted prior to working on.

Edit #2 Just a reminder, the devrel email is not for feature requests. Thanks for your understanding.

As always, it’s nice to get these friendly updates from the crew. Of course, we’d rather see a headline that reads CM9 is now available, but patience is a virtue and good things come to those who wait. For now, that’s exactly what we’re going to have to do.

Source: Google+