Secret bounty targets

Maybe I missed it, but I’ve never seen the rationale for the bounty targets being secret. I’d have thought that publishing them might have encouraged people to bid, not discourage them. Perhaps if I saw that, say, the USB bounty target was only 100 quid away, personally I’d be trying to complete that bounty.

There is no secret bounty target! A developer can pickup the bounty task whenever they like.
If the bounty is still open and collecting money, it means nobody has started work on it yet!

Right. https://www.riscosopen.org/bounty/help/poll_states and a news roundup (*) from the Iconbar made me think there was some sort of target that the bounties had to hit.

*"none of the bounties have yet hit their (secret) target values, so it looks like any budding programmers will have to wait a bit longer before they’re able to take on any of the tasks listed (unless they want to do it for free!"

Hi. There is no target amount for any bounty here at ROOL. However, we’re sure that there are developers out there who have a figure in mind that would make them sufficiently interested to claim the bounty and start work. So a bounty doesn’t really have a target; it has as many targets as there are potentially-interested developers – and only they know what the “get up and do it” amount is for them. :)

In that case, it might be worth updating the website to make that clear :) At the moment there isn’t any information on how people should get in touch if they want to claim the bounty.

At the bottom of the Bounties page is a “More information” link. On that page, near the top, it says people should contact us and links to our Contacts page. I thought that was reasonably clear: want to claim a bounty? Email us:info@riscosopen.org.

I agree we can probably clarify the fact that we don’t actually have any targets for the bounties within ROOL. And we don’t have deadlines either. It’s just a pragmatic, periodic review. As with everything like this, the more you think about the edge cases and document them on your site, the less people want to take part because all those words look too onerous…!

At the bottom of the Bounties page is a “More information” link. On that page, near the top, it says people should contact us and links to our Contacts page. I thought that was reasonably clear

Ah, OK. In that case I’m going to claim that that page has been changed since I last looked at it ;-)

…in which case this thread could be renamed “secret page histories”

I think that page was last updated on 1st June, 2011. :)

Hopefully not to much beside the subject of this ‘secret bountie targets’:

Is this forum a good place to ask if anyone would let say, start programming a SPI driver module for RISC OS on the RaspBerry Pi if some one would donate enough?

I reckon such a discussion could be started as a new topic under the parent Bounties forum. I think that’s how it’s s’posed to work, but someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

I have belatedly updated the Bounty information page by adding a section called “Why aren’t the targets and deadlines published?” to try to clarify some of the issues raised above.

Is there an anticipated expiry date available for the bounties? [not a definite date, but rather how likely the bounty is to being expired soon] I cannot imagine the EDID work would be too difficult on systems that support such a thing (and have documentation available), though if I remember correctly, that bounty has been sitting around for a while.

Certainly, I would help a lot if RISC OS could drop the reliance on MDFs these days and attempt to match monitor capabilities to hardware capabilities. I run a 1280×1024 mode on the Pi and it matched with a monitor of the same type using an HDMI→VGA adaptor. The same setup on a Beagle xM usually does not work, and needs a lot of poking and prodding to get something (I usually end up in 800×600) working. Maybe these issues would go away if RISC OS stopped obeying what is probably and unsuitable MDF and instead just looked at what the hardware wanted and was capable of? I guess in RISC OS somewhere is a structure of mode definitions (normally read from the MDF). It would be good to get this from the EDID and fall back to the MDF if, and only if, the returned data was missing or illogical.
Just thinking aloud, and possibly in the wrong topic anyway….

not a definite date, but rather how likely the bounty is to being expired soon

…or if “expiry” is a bad word, maybe call it an “Interest Level Indicator”? ;-)

I guess in RISC OS somewhere is a structure of mode definitions (normally read from the MDF).

Correct – the ScreenModes module is the place to look as it handles reading the MDF, generating the list of modes used by the display manager, and translating mode requests (e.g. width, height & BPP) into a full set of parameters for sending to the driver.

It would be good to get this from the EDID and fall back to the MDF if, and only if, the returned data was missing or illogical.

Well we’ve got code for converting EDID data to an MDF, and we’ve got an interface which will allow you to read the EDID data from a monitor. All we need is for someone to come along and tie it all together into something polished and user-friendly.

All we need is for someone to come along and tie it all together into something polished and user-friendly.

Are the details of the EDID support bounty still accurate, or does Will’s code now already cover some of this?

I’d say it’s worth updating it to say that we have EDID parsing code available. The end goal of the bounty is still the same, but the starting point has moved forward a bit since the page first went up.

I’ve just updated the bounty description a bit. Hopefully, that should be enough to keep it ticking along.

Is there an anticipated expiry date available for the bounties?

Here’s how it works: we open the bounty with a vague idea in the back of our minds for the amount of effort involved. We convert that into a monetary amount using UK minimum wage and assume that’s the lowest figure anyone is going to want to claim it for. Keeping that in mind, we periodically (less often than perhaps we should) look at the open bounties and gague:

a) just how lethargic is it?
b) how important is it and should we just push it more?
c) is it a non-starter?

Some of them are just dead ducks so we expire them and spread any donated cash into the other open ones. Otherwise, we grant them a reprieve and try to make some noise to spur people into donating.