MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Koreader running on Kobos (all of them, hopefully!)

giorgio130 · 07-20-2013, 05:36 PM

Hi everyone! Nice to see the thread is flourishing and the interest is higher and higher.
I'd like to share a little thought. When I started to port Koreader (back then it was still called KindlePdfViewer, or KPV) I just tried to put toghether something that "simply worked" on my Glo: lots of hacks in the code, that very easily could break compatibility with kindle and made the code less readable and efficient. Then I thought that maybe that was just the first step, if I could add something to Koreader, why keep it for myself? Or even more, why keeping it for Kobo users? That way I could thank appropriately the original developers, by giving back something useful for them. So I started to clean up the code, and propose it for merging in the upstream project. It was much easier than expected.
This is to say I feel a little unconfortable with patches and mods that add functionality but are simply distributed as a zip or rar file. Sure, those are great, the authors could have kept them for themselves and this way, everyone benefits from them, but only on kobos.
I've merged some little changes from cgm999 into main koreader and I'm planning to go on with this work, but still I'm a little unconfortable with that as well, I feel like I'm stealing someone else's work. Moreover, if those become more frequent (and I'd love that), the amount of work would become impossible to manage.
So, all of you modders, once you feel your addition is stable and useful, don't stop at the "hack" step, but make it part of official koreader by presenting it on github:
https://github.com/koreader/koreader/issues
It will give you proper credit, ensure that your work won't get duplicated by someone else and survive in later releases without patching every time, and it will give something back to the great original developers of KPV and Koreader.

07-20-2013, 05:36 PM	#316
giorgio130 Time Waster Posts: 422 Karma: 289160 Join Date: May 2011 Device: Kobo Glo and Aura HD	Contribute back? Hi everyone! Nice to see the thread is flourishing and the interest is higher and higher. I'd like to share a little thought. When I started to port Koreader (back then it was still called KindlePdfViewer, or KPV) I just tried to put toghether something that "simply worked" on my Glo: lots of hacks in the code, that very easily could break compatibility with kindle and made the code less readable and efficient. Then I thought that maybe that was just the first step, if I could add something to Koreader, why keep it for myself? Or even more, why keeping it for Kobo users? That way I could thank appropriately the original developers, by giving back something useful for them. So I started to clean up the code, and propose it for merging in the upstream project. It was much easier than expected. This is to say I feel a little unconfortable with patches and mods that add functionality but are simply distributed as a zip or rar file. Sure, those are great, the authors could have kept them for themselves and this way, everyone benefits from them, but only on kobos. I've merged some little changes from cgm999 into main koreader and I'm planning to go on with this work, but still I'm a little unconfortable with that as well, I feel like I'm stealing someone else's work. Moreover, if those become more frequent (and I'd love that), the amount of work would become impossible to manage. So, all of you modders, once you feel your addition is stable and useful, don't stop at the "hack" step, but make it part of official koreader by presenting it on github: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/issues It will give you proper credit, ensure that your work won't get duplicated by someone else and survive in later releases without patching every time, and it will give something back to the great original developers of KPV and Koreader.