What sucks about Kindle hacking?

[katadelos]

I've been thinking a lot about where this community is at, where it could be and what kind of stuff would be cool to do in the future.

As part of that, I'd be interested in hearing more about what people find frustrating about Kindle hacking and things that they think could be improved upon.

From my perspective:

• The documentation is bad. There's a ton of useful information on this forum (and the Wiki) but it's poorly structured and in some cases, is needlessly cryptic or massively outdated. This seems like it would be a bit of a barrier to somebody looking to quickly "onboard" themselves in order to start building their project.
• Package installation could be improved upon. It's somewhat strange that we're tied to installing packages via MRPI considering how inefficient this is. To some extent this is necessary (i.e bootstrapping a freshly jailbroken device with KUAL + USBNet), but it would be cool to have a package manager and be able to do something like opkg install koreader
• Cross-compiling is a massive pain. We're limited in what pre-existing software can be built due to the really interesting stuff tending to have nested dependency chains that need to be cross-compiled first. For example, I needed a copy of X11VNC a while back which required me to manually build the majority of the X11 stack first which was.. not fun.

[kdusr]

Complaining is always easy

[jhowell]

Lack of interest in the platform is the primary cause of the other issues.

[mireq]

Missing source code links. I am currently searching for jailbreak hotfix source code and cannot find any relevant link.

[NiLuJe]

It's... in the (JB, main) package? There's a giant WHERES_THE_SOURCE.txt file in there?

[mireq]

WHERES_THE_SOURCE.txt contains only link to snapshots thread. JailBreak Hotfix section contains only link to binary (i am searching code repository) and jb-hotfix post with install instructions and link to snapshots thread. Really i have searched carefully and i have not found source code repository, to which i could contribute.

[NiLuJe]

The JB hotfix has a weird history, that means it was never really supposed to see such a wide audience, which means it's not deployed as carefully as the other packages.

The TL;DR being that it's built from the 5.4.x JB tree, so when I said the main JB package, I meant that one (the one tagged "K5 JB" in the snapshots listing).

The actual source tree is public, but it's an old SVN repo with a complex layout, so you're better off looking at the actual package, as it's complete and already laid out properly, unlike the repo . This should be self-evident once you take an actual look at the build scripts, because they're all there, and they're responsible for piecing it all together.

(You might be encountering links to the Trac instance instead of the repo. The Trac instance is down because Python 3 shenanigans and lack of time to deal with it. The SVN repo is up, though).

[jbaskin]

As someone without technical knowledge, I'd also say part of the problem is a lack of compelling use cases. Maybe this is actually a bad documentation problem that you mentioned, but a lot of the things I'd have as a wishlist for jailbreak features/apps seem like they are hard/impossible to do:

Slide up or down along the side of the page to adjust front light (in the main reader application, not just KOreader)

wireless sideloading of KFX books into the main reader from Calibre

series grouping of sideloaded books

ability to type out short goodreads reviews and not just give star ratings

IF games (the gargoyle port I'm seeing on the forum looks like its not had the substantial updates from the mainline github branch)

Ability to sideload audiobooks and have them sync up with ebooks

USB-C audio

A podcast app

A news aggregator app

[cvkemp]

Everyone seems to miss the designed use of Kindles, which is to read Amazon’s ebooks. And yes Amazon owned Audible audiobooks. That is the total design and intend of the Kindle, and why I like it.