Custom Capability and CLI Developer Preview

[orangebucket (Graham)]

@blake.arnold

Yep - we’re well aware of the impact of this. Ideally things should have worked well when we beta released it but they unfortunately got borked by an update to the device plugin. Hotfix should be coming later this week that gets things back on track and if there are any further issues we’ve already let the team in Korea that runs the device plugin know that we’ll need a rapid fix. We’ll be here with updates.

I know I have been banging on about this, but I think it is worth repeating that there are two issues of concern with the device plugin:

1. If ‘working’ is defined as functioning as described in the published API, the plugin hasn’t actually come close to working with custom capabilities since day one. Hopefully that is something that will be resolved sooner rather than later. We just need a fixed target of an API that is correct, and an implementation that matches it.

2. If ‘working’ is defined as functioning as described in the published API, the plugin isn’t working for a lot of the standard capabilities either. I don’t think we can do anything about that and nor do we necessarily want to, but …

By 2), I mean the only way to know what we are going to end up with is a good old fashioned ‘suck it and see’. For example, we can ask for the temperature to appear in our detail views, but if we think we are going to get it displayed with a slider as defined in the capability presentation we can think again, and if we think we are going to get separate temperature and humidity tiles we can jog right on. Under what circumstances we get ‘Quick Controls’ on the device view page also remains a complete mystery, but if we have any influence on it, no one has told us.

It seems to me that when it comes to standard capabilities, the API is a list of things that we would be seeing had the plugin team not come up with things they thought were way cooler and implemented them instead. They may be right, but it doesn’t help when we are working to generate device presentations that seem to be little more than a starting point in negotiations.

G.