Those with access to the beta Symbian website will know that we currently have source code available, but no binaries. I thought I’d let you know what’s happening behind the scenes, and give you some idea of what’s coming.
On your marks …
At the beginning of April, Symbian received the initial contribution from Nokia: that’s the source code in our Mercurial repositories. It’s a subset of the live source code used within Nokia, the difference being the source code which Nokia has licensed from other companies.
We also received a set of binaries and tools built by Nokia from their live source, and then filtered to remove anything generated from the licenced source code. This isn’t a contribution and we won’t be distributing it, but it’s a fantastic help while we are establishing our build machines and build processes.
Get set …
Using the source code in Mercurial, we have been running builds to see which of those binaries we can generate for ourselves. The binaries that we can build will form the core of the Platform Development Kit (PDK) which will be freely downloadable by anyone once the Symbian website goes live.
We have also worked out which binaries we can’t generate from the source code in Mercurial. For each of those files, we are now asking
- What is this file for? What happens if we leave it out?
- If it’s needed, how can we deliver it alongside the PDK?
Some files are used when compiling the source code that we do have. Other files are executed when running the Symbian Platform emulator. Our generic solution for those files is to provide them under an “R&D licence”, which allows them to be used for development purposes but not sold in products. The only question then is who to licence each file from…?
Go ?
Not quite yet. We’ve reached the point of repackaging that original delivery from Nokia into PDK plus R&D licenced binaries that contain a working emulator, and we are close to being able to generate that structure from a full platform build which starts with just source code in Mercurial and the R&D licenced binaries.
We are also just about to receive an update from Nokia, reflecting an extra 4 weeks of work on the code including sorting out various known issues in the original delivery. This is intended to be the last delivery of binaries to Symbian, so we will use it to finalise the set of R&D licenced binaries. We then add the binaries we can build from the updated source, and publish!
Thanks for the update, it’s reassuring to know that progress is still being made, albeit at the expected glacial pace, given the magnitude of the task at hand.
For non members will the source be available for the development kit? I ask as presently it’s painful debugging on WINSCW when a panic happens and the call stack just points to assembler.
Non-members still won’t have access to source code which is in packages under the Symbian Foundation Licence, but we are pushing to get started on converting them to fully Open Source. Until then I’m afraid that debugging will still involve a lot of fairly meaningless assembler stack traces.
It is really hard to get much details on this matter and we really appreciate this information.
My company is planning to develop a Firewall application but couldn’t get hold of necessary resources despite few weeks attempt. We know that there was an IPHook example in the previous DevKit, and wondering if we can access those if we get the new Symbian partnership?
Thanks again!
Hi Hasith,
There are a couple of pointers at the end of this discussion thread on the Symbian Developer Network.
Does this help?
// David W.
[...] managed to build ourselves from the source code in Mercurial – I mentioned this at the end of my blog posting back in May, and it’s taken longer than I’d hoped (but not as long as I feared). Expect it to hit [...]