SlimRoms is Back to Life, for Real This Time

The SlimRoms team has been silent for a while, due to various technical and management problems, and we heard more about their situation today due to an informative G+ post. After a SlimRoms member responsible for the servers suddenly left them, they realised how much they were relying on a single person and decided to become a legal entity as a solution to this issue. For example, this would mean server payments are no longer reliant on one individual.

Unfortunately, the process was more complicated than expected due to the SlimRoms team lead, Kufikugel, having to leave for personal reasons. This even resulted in the servers being shut down for a week, effectively locking them from their website, builds management and gerrit.

On the bright side, this allowed them to learn from their mistakes. SlimRoms is now a company in the UK, allowing them to avoid the scenario mentioned above in the future. Their goal hasn’t changed, nor are they looking to make money from this — the team assures us their work will always be for the benefit of the community alone.

SlimRoms will also be jumping over to a bigger, dedicated server now, which can handle Gerrit much better. The old website will remain in use until the newer version is completed (if you’re interested in helping the team out, feel free to reach out as they don’t have any dedicated front-end web developers). For discussions and questions, you can head over to the SlimRoms forums on XDA. This section will now be used as SlimRoms’ main forum.

SlimRoms intends to open source everything their system admins build in the process of maintaining Slim’s infrastructure

The SlimRoms team has some exciting plans for the future, too. Builds will be coming up as soon as possible, though there’s no ETA available. A stable build for SlimLP will definitely be available, even if Android M is out before then. The team will also take parts in an exciting project with BitSyko to make available a common base (i.e. hardware support) for building ROMs, which other developers will be able to use. Last but not least, they also plan to open source some tools they use for development, allowing other developers to make use of them (and that’s what XDA is about ❤).

Some of the team’s plans were exclusively revealed to XDA. An API for OTAs along with a custom app are being developed, and both will be open sourced.

In addition to that, a new storage manager solution is also being worked on. (Note that this isn’t Android specific.) Hosts will be able to host files themselves or by using a provider (e.g. Google Drive, GitHub, Dropbox, etc), and users can log in with their accounts or directly to a provider instead. This also allows for having groups of users sharing access to certain files, or even password protecting files and folders. For hosts, using multiple providers will allow for dynamic balancing with users being served from appropriate providers automatically. In short, it offers load balancing, acts as a single entry point for multiple providers, and adds some useful features for power users.

Finally, SlimRoms intends to open source everything their system admins build in the process of maintaining Slim’s infrastructure: build scripts, jenkins/gerrit plugins, config files, health checkers, website, deployment tools, etc. This can be a great learning resource or a source of inspiration for the curious.

Got any further questions? Just leave a comment below — someone from Slim will be monitoring this article’s comments for a while!

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