PixelPower wrote:
So, it’s taken over a month (and 5 version jumps!?) just to troubleshoot and repackage 1.01.12. :(
Not wanting to belittle their efforts or anything, to be honest it could be a really innovative and solid piece of coding, just that it doesn’t sound exciting and the only issue with updates was one firmware (ironically) designed to fix updates…
I get a mental image of there being just one guy at WD responsible for firmwares, and that he’s coding in a dank cellar, hating these products with all his heart.
It’s the simplest sounding features or fixes that can be the toughest to fix or implement. Issues can elude a programmer or group as they tried to get to the root cause. I’m sure that the firmware update feature was one of the earlier parts of the code that were written. It takes time to get the flow of older code and then things become more clear.
It could be that that there were a few places to fix, but instead of potentially borking everything, the fixes were tested one at a time to ensure that nothing got worse.
I’d write off 2 -3 version to add some logging, more logging and clean-up.
That leaves 2-3 versions to actually fix the problems.
Seems more than reasonable to me, especially for a section like this. You don’t want to just fix something and get it out.
As for the time it takes, it could also be due to thrid-party bugs in the source. It may be a wait for the third party to turn around something, or the time it takes to really understand what is going on.
This is from personal experience in dealing with large projects with small to mid sized groups.
I’m glad the WD has a solution for this, and the fact that it wasn’t turned around very quickly shows to me that they most likely tested the updater so that it doesn’t cause so many casualties.