Questions Regarding OAI That Would Help Me Build A Device Config Verification Tool

[ranaji10]

Hello @tsterbak, @MagicLike, fellow contributors,

First of all, thanks for putting your minds and efforts into this project and to make sure our phones can have an extended lifespan that's not dictated by manufacturers, but rather the support from an active community of like minded people. I'll jump straight onto the reason why I'm reaching out -

I'm building a tool that checks whether an OS build is safe for a specific device without executing it. Currently I have a Device Matrix built only from the devices that I have; a Descriptor Corpus that's pulled from open source device configurations, basically OpenAndroidInstaller, LineageOS and PostmarketOS; and a bunch of Verify + Test scripts to check whether it's safe / unsafe / unknown. I have some questions that would be helpful in making sure the tool integrates seamlessly with all of the OS builds OAI has so far, and in future.

My questions:

1. Does the 'supported_device_codes' field mean that this device build works for exactly these device codes or can it work for all devices in this family?

2. Is your unlock-step consistency deliberate? All 90 of your configs declare unlock_bootloader: as a structural step, and declare 'is_ab_device'. Can I if enforce this as a schema requirement while building my tool?

3. Do configs record USB modes at each step? For eg, does it track that device is in fastboot -> it boots into recovery -> it mounts as MTP?

4. Do you have a standard term for "device visible to OS but invisible to browser"? Are you already tracking this somewhere, if yes, could you please tell me what this schema field is called?

5. OAI is packaged as a desktop app. Did you try browser automation and hit some USB access or driver limits or was that never in scope?

6. Would a tool that runs at the start of the installer workflow, that lets you confidently say yes/no/unknown instead of hoping a user's device is close enough to the supported list, be useful to OAI?

Thanks for your patience in reading through this long message. Your responses would be highly appreciated and would help me decide on a direction based on the learnings from this community. Cheers and have a great week ahead!

[ranaji10]

Hello again, another thing came up while I was going through the configs.

I noticed a bunch of configs carry an untested: true flag. My interpretation of that is that this config was written but nobody's actually confirmed it works on real hardware yet. Is that a correct assumption?

A couple of things I'd love to know:

1. When that flag is set, does it mean nobody has confirmed the device works, or does it mean something like "this specific step hasn't been tested"?
2. When someone does confirm a device works, is the flag cleared, or is it possible that a config could have been tested but it's still showing untested: true ?
3. Since the direction I'm taking my tool is that it would treat any build from an untested: true config as something that should never come back as safe, but unverified. So the question is, if the flag is actually kept up to date?

Thanks in advance for your time. Cheers!