It was not an April fools joke; a signed update.zip has been posted to patch ESD56 to ESE81. This update includes a new recovery image that closes the existing root exploit, but does not modify MBM, so the SBF files we have will still work. Aside from a new baseband version, there’s nothing new in the official 2.1 that hasn’t already been backported to DroidMod 1.0, so I recommend that everyone wait for our dev team to release a new ROM before jumping on the update.

DMUpdater version 0.1.1 uses a new tool for reading and writing the recovery MTD that is compatible with users that have bad blocks. The updater should now work on every Droid, regardless of bad blocks. To install, click here directly from your phone’s browser.

UPDATE: Users running Koush’s CyanogenMod build are getting an error about the SD card not being mounted. The cause has been determined, and a fix is being tested.

FYI, We’ve been working with recovery alot this week.
I have gotten charging working in recovery, as well as support for BOTH our sprecovery and yaffs2 image/CM style nandroid backups. This way you won’t have to keep switching back and forth depending on what ROM you’re currently using
We still have a few things we need/want to fix/add however.

Just wanted to give you guys a heads up on whats going on
~trevorj

Sorry if it seems like we’re “not doing anything”, but we set high standards on our work for you guys [and ourselves!]

The engineering release of ESE53 is bit of a scenario for us. We could hurry up and throw something together, or we could work hard at what we were already working on. We decided that if/when we get a sanctioned OTA 2.1 release we will look into it more thoroughly for 1.x. Till then, we are keeping ourselves out of grey area of copying/pasting/illegal/warez/crap, and are working toward doing some great things.

[Edit by trevorj:] We edited the original post a bit to better reflect what we meant, a bit was being taken out of context . We are working very hard on the next major, and we plan on it being straight up liquified awesome. Mmm. We just don’t find interest in rushedly yanking some build’s files and hurrying to get something out there. We played that game, and it only leads to a rushed result. Thats not where the fun is. And, we go where the fun is. After all, we are doing this merely because it’s fun and we enjoy it! And we think it’s fantastic that others do, too. A big thanks to everyone who uses the ROM, it’s only the tip of what it’s becoming!

We bounced back from a crippling nutshot when the sholes.info server went down, which was no small ordeal! We are indebted to the good folks at Beyond Hosting for helping us get our primary website up within a matter of hours, and to the people who sunk their time and effort into getting the main page infrastructure for it set up in that time.
Try bringing up an entire site in under 24 hours, it’s not fun. BIG thanks to BeyondHosting for their help!

We also re-pushed SM/DMupdater, which was a task in itself. I still don’t know how that got finished as quick as it did. Camel deserves a big round of applause for his hard work and dedication.

We then released DM1.0, which in our small opinion, has been the most stable ROM we’ve experienced for the Droid. We’d hate to follow up what we feel is such a good release with anything less, so we’ve been taking our time. By the looks of it, we’ll be releasing minor revisions to 1.x in the interim while we get some liquified awesome going.

Getting the repositories back online was the next step, and Aschen Networks graciously provided VPS space at a moments notice. Provisioning the VPS, securing it, getting git setup, and recovering the scattered repositories and importing the old code proved to be a bit larger task then we had hoped! But, we are glad it’s nice and done. Sgx was a huge, huge, help in all of this, he’s been a great addition to the team.

Forums were being setup as well, more work was being done on the repository server, mainly getting gitweb and git-daemon properly installed so that people could browse the source repositories, and we could more easily view changes as they were applied. Again, sgx is the man.

About this time we started importing and testing the latest 2.6.29 kernel release from AOSP, in an effort to keep the innovation moving. This consisted of a review by Trevorj and myself of hundreds of commits from AOSP, TI, and the mainline Kernel.org trees. We have been in-house testing new boot images, as well as updating the mkrom tools to work properly with git. If you compiled any of the old sholes kernels, we highly recommend you take a look. Just remember to set CROSS_COMPILE. I know we’ve loved it so far!

The engineering testing release of ESE53 dropped soon after, causing quite a stir. The general consensus was to wait for the official OTA, since the person who leaked it hinted at a binary watermark being included. Better safe than sorry. Plus, we’d rather work on the fun stuff than simply copy files and re-release something that barely has anything different than our current release does already, to be honest..

Since then, we’ve put up the wiki at droiddev.org, which will soon have dev information, instructions for using the tools and repositories, and information pertaining to the rom image format we have pioneered.

SirPsychoS has pushed the SP recovery source to the repository server sometime last week(forgive me for forgetting the date), and has been working on fixing the makefiles and dependencies. He has also retooled mkrom to use fakeroot, and made some other enhancements. Go SPS!

Bugzilla was just deployed to handle any user problems relating to our release, and this seems to have caught some flack. Let me state that having bug tracking is a pivotal part of a solid and stable release system. We love feedback on what is broken, and a forum is just not the right tool for that. Our Bugzilla installation automatically informs the proper parties when a bug is entered, keeps the various bugs in an easy to navigate format, and makes sure that everyone is informed along the way. No longer will your valuable user input be hidden under 30 posts about lolcats and earwigs. It’s great for everyone! Many thanks to trevorj for setting this up.

We decided that we’d rather get our infrastructure fully operational before we could get more out, because a solid foundation makes for a solid project, an awesome community, and awesome releases.

To all those who have supported us during this bumpy transition, we thank you. It’s great to know that people can see through the fog and realize that we do this because we enjoy it, because it’s interesting, and because it furthers the community as a whole in doing what we all want to do: make the Droid better in every way imaginable.

sgx [and the rest of the DroidMod team!]

If we have forgotten anyone or anything important, please let us know.

We have just completed an install of bugzilla! It’s so nice to have this back, too.

Feel free to use @ http://bugs.droiddev.org

We are currently in the middle of upgrading the VPS account that git.droiddev.org is hosted on, in part because we underestimated our requirements when we initially set it up (git clones currently hit the ram limit), and partly in anticipation of some upcoming behind the scenes automation work related to Project Durden.

During this time there will most likely be some sporadic outages on the repository server.

We expect this transition to be complete by monday.

This upgrade will not affect the main site, the forums, or the wiki, as they are hosted on a separate server.

sgx, signing off!

EDIT: The upgrade is currently complete, so git should be fully functional once more. If you still have issues please contact us in #droiddev on freenode.

EDIT2: I have a forum post here that might help people understand more about what’s been going on, why we’re using git, etc.

As many of you have probably noticed, we’ve been migrating everything over to our shiny new git.

We’ve had to disable cloning and snapshots for a bit, as it ate up over 1200G of bandwidth and more within the last few days alone

We have a plan of action, it will be back asap.

I’m posting this so everyone knows that we’re definitely not turning any less open than before.

UPDATE: Git is back online. http://git.droiddev.org

Just an FYI, we are working hard at the next release. We have many things we are all working on, it’s only been 10 days, just keep a look out for the future. We’re glad we can actually work on the cool stuff now. =)

We’ll keep you posted with updates.