andre klapper’s blog.

Congrats everybody to 2.24.0! Been hard work sometimes, but always fun.

Now while you, dear user, are probably going to send zmrzlina, chocolate, cheese and kisses to your beloved favorite hackers*, you might also consider becoming involved. Here’s some offers I have in mind (unfortunately all unpaid positions). Not all of them require coding skills (I don’t code either, so “Why don’t you do it yourself?” comments are unrequired).

• nautilus-actions is looking for a new maintainer, see the announcement. Interested in helping out? Or even fixing the most favourite bug? Feel free to contact the former maintainer if interested!
• Update ancient project websites. We have lots of old projects sites in http://www.gnome.org/projects/. You don’t want to code but you know about HTML and a bit of CSS and your Wnglish is good. A list was provided by element3260 as part of his GHOP work, available here - this should be transfered to a wikipage at live.gnome.org first, see the Gnome Goals pages for an example how this could look like.
• Push the Gnome Goals to clean up our stack for 3.0 by providing patches. There’s still enough to do. Also see GioPort and GtkPrintPort.
• Take a look at bugs in Bugzilla with gnome-love keyword set. They are a good place to start working on the code of your favourite project.
• Unrelated to this, worst translation issues will become blocker bugs for GNOME 2.26 too. Providing good applications definitely also includes a well-localized UI, and this is impossible when not fixing them.
  Some examples (not to blame developers, but to get a feeling what this means): Missing context, split sentences, english structures, broken plurals.
  Most (not all) translation issues are easy to fix and gnome-love bugs too. Just take a look at bugs with L10N keyword set.
• Identify unmaintained modules. I’d love to have a small script that could run on my svn checkout and printing the date of the last svn commit (svn log –limit 1) that was not an updated .po file. But I don’t do code, so if anybody has too much time… *cough* Would make it easier to identify rotten modules in order to remove them from Bugzilla and the translation statistics, so nobody wastes time anymore on them.Another shameless request - I’d also love to have information on the language team pages about the date of their last commit for that language. Would make identifying non-active teams or maintainers easier.
• Nothing in that list for you? Don’t want to code? For more ideas, visit JoinGnome.

(* “hackers” refers to developers, translators, artists, marketing folks, bugsquadders, doc writers, …)

Private:

• Finally been able to attend a concert of Vypsaná fixa at a festival. Feeling happy for the rest of the day (not only because of that one band).
• Watched Prague’s local icehockey derby Slavia vs. Sparta (2:1). Could have been more exciting. Security checks like at an airport. Same as the food prices at the venue: Impressive, in a negative sense.
• Bought two beers at night and gave one to the first person I met on the streets. Two street cleaners lucky about having a short break. Do that more often, it’s easy.
• It’s that Burčák season again! Yummy.
• Travelled to Maemo Summit with jbenc. One guy sitting next to us in the train heard that we were talking about linux and joined us. There’s really linux users out their in the wild, they exist, and they are not antisocial!

Maemo:

• Maemo Summit itself was awesome - most impressions have been already covered by the blog posts on Planet Maemo. Much more people than expected and a nice geeky venue. In general it also underlined my positive impression that Nokia’s opening and understanding Open Source better. My talk went well though there could have been more attendees. Most discussions (like always at conferences) happening outside of the talks or when having a beer at the evening, quite productive. Great Openismus party on Saturday, great company!

GNOME:

• Now looking forward to the GNOME 2.24.0 release coming up this week. Hope we all (devs, translators, documentators, artists, bugsquadders and so on) did a good job and will get content users and good reviews.

Nokia

Thanks to Nokia I had the opportunity to spend a few days at Helsinki last week, having talks, discussions and meetings with several people, especially in Maemo error management.

As I interact with Nokia’s error management by discussing/forwarding bug reports, and as there have been some confusion and misunderstandings already (Karsten’s and my work do not fit perfectly into Nokia’s current well-defined and not easily to change workflows), I gave a small presentation about what we are doing, the problems and expectations.
I see ourselves (the maemo.org bugmasters) as a kind of bridge between the Maemo community and Nokia’s product management. Being involved in Maemo and GNOME, we’re used to open source and understand its culture, but I can also understand managers being conservative when it comes to changes and when advantages aren’t obvious at first sight.
So at the beginning of my presentation I asked the audience (Nokians involved in error management) how many of them have ever dealt with open source community, culture and practices. It was less than 15%, something I had expected. My theory is that in general, professional error management in open source projects often simply does/did not exist, hence there can’t be that many people existing already used to it - definitely not Nokia’s “fault” or whatever. I explained that 3rd party developers, power users and fans can help any company leading an open source project in producing better software by helping in testing and providing patches and feedback, but they also have expectations and want to get something back for their efforts, e.g. becoming more involved and having more transparent processes. Or to quote a fine sentence by Jaffa that I also said while having my talk: “If Nokia aren’t seen to be committed to the community, why should the community be committed to Nokia?”
In my impression Nokia has already improved in understanding, but there’s still a long way to go. There have been “bad” examples, e.g. I was told that Nokia probably publishing updates more often now is already a sign of becoming more open (Sorry, this is an internal decision and has nothing to do with community involvement). But there also have been good examples. See, Nokia is a big company with lots of different opinions and people with different backgrounds and hence different definitions of “Openness”, and talking to each other helps to understand “the other point of view” better. Some Nokians involved in error management will be present at Maemo Summit. Looking forward to continuing discussions with community folks (and input) around.

A valid argument that I can second is that developers want to have one central place to track their bug reports. This is currently Nokia’s internal Bug tracking system. Some Nokia developers also comment in Maemo Bugzilla (mostly those coming from open source too, and in my impression this number has increased a bit in the last months), but quite often you don’t have the time to track two systems. Hence I waste spend a lot of time already on keeping reports in sync (been working lately on porting a script I use in GNOME Bugzilla to quickly insert comments on bug reports to save some time).
But I also do second that in the long run we should have those components that are completely open source in Maemo Bugzilla only. Now you might ask: Why not starting this immediately? So when examining on how hard it will be to open some parts of the existing internal infrastructure, I was often told that there are legal issues to resolve first. It’s not only about Nokia’s internal Bug tracking system, there’s much more that’s part of the long tail - information that a commercial company does not want to be accessed by its competitors, such as for example policy plans, product and hardware information, information about the internal testing infrastructure and especially copyright related issues. So it’s time to identify and check those blockers one by one. But there definitely IS slow change (maybe too slow for some Maemo folks that have been expecting more changes for the last two years), probably Nokia just needs more lawyers to handle all this more quickly.

maemo.org Bugzilla stuff

Apart from the ongoing triaging of new incoming bugs, syncing between the internal Bug tracker and Maemo Bugzilla and reorganizing some components in Maemo Bugzilla to fit better with Nokia’s internal development teams, we are going to remove the deprecated bug resolution RESOLVED LATER in the next two weeks. “LATER” either means WONTFIX, or the bug should just remain in open state. This requires “fixing” the existing bugs first. After that, LATER can be removed from the Bugzilla code. We have already removed the meaningless Target Milestone “Next” and retriaged all bugs RESOLVED REMIND that also needs to be removed from the code.
I have also disabled setting the Target milestone when filing a new bug, because Target Milestones are definitely not wishlists. Setting “Fremantle” or “Harmattan” as a target milestone for a bug should really mean that a developer works on it and plans to get the issue fixed by that release. We currently also discuss on switching to the “guided” bug entry template to make it easier to file valuable bug reports, but currently that template is way too crowded and noisy to be useful, so this will take some time and changes.

• The Maemo Bugsquad is now in place. For triagers we have a Triage guide, general and product generic Stock answers that can be copied & pasted into bug reports, and for reporters an updated (maemo’fied & and shortened) Bugwriting How-to. We also decided on a policy when to close rotting moreinfo bugs.
• There will be a Maemo Bugsquad BoF at the Maemo summit on Saturday, 16h30. Everybody also interested in managing the Maemo bugs is highly welcome.
• Being part of the current 100 Days plan, the Maemo crew has five sprints (and open IRC meetings too) à 20 days with defined tasks. For those who haven’t seen it yet, we also log our daily activities so our work becomes more transparent.
  As a first step to Get Nokia more involved into Maemo Bugzilla, I’m currently looking into Reorganizing components in Bugzilla to make it easier for Nokia’s developer teams to be able to track those reports that affect their scope.

Yay! Catch me if you can.

Yes, it’s that great time of the year again: GUADEC, the GNOME conference, this time at Istanbul, and now it’s time to provide a very quick summary so far.

guenther and me had arrived on early Monday morning at the airport that is located in the Asian part of the town. After arriving at our apartment and chilling on the terrace it was very impressive to listen to all the morning prayers of the Muezzins when dawn took place at 4:30AM.The place is nice and you have an awesome view on the city. Since all Openismus employees live in the same building, we’ve had two evenings sitting together on our terrace and having a good time.

Our venue (Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi) is located directly at the Bosporus so you can sit outside, have a lot of conversations and meetings with friends and other developers, and watch huge ships passing by.

The BoF that we gave on Bugtriaging in GNOME could have had a few more attendees, but the time was moved to have it one hour earlier so many interested people missed it. If you’re one of them and are interesting: We’re going to repeat it today (Thursday) at 3:30PM (meet at the info desk and then find a free room), right after Kris’ keynote on the state of GTK+ (definitely worth to attend to also find out more about the future of GNOME in general I’d say).

Besides, I have huge problems to access some of my mail accounts and IRC (conference wifi). Youtube seems to be generally blocked here (”Access to this web site is banned by Telekomünikasyon İletişim Baskanliḡi”).

Ah yeah, and for the third year in a row we also had a football tournament with lots of fun and some nice goals:

(Picture by Alia and Zaheer Abbas. © All Rights reserved.)

Eine Woche GUADEC in Istanbul.
Istanbul stellt sicherlich einige der bisherigen Eindrücke, die man durch die in Deutschland lebenden türkischstämmigen Menschen erhalten hat, auf den Kopf. Die Stadt ist in einigem internationaler und fortschrittlicher als ich es je erwartet hätte, und ist dennoch zugleich unkompliziert, gerade in Bezug auf den Straßenverkehr (Taxifahrer fahren 140 in 70-Zonen etc oder hupen, wenn sie überholen, damit der Gegenverkehr abbremst). Danke dafür.

Beeindruckend, wenn morgens um halb fünf langsam die Sonne aufgeht und gleichzeitig ein Dutzend Muezzine in der Umgebung der eigenen Dachterrasse anfangen zu beten. Die Moscheen sind wunderschön. Und ich warte auf den Putsch, der aber sicherlich erst im nächsten Monat geschehen wird. Während eines Meetings heute morgen in der Cafeteria wurden auf einmal die Fernseher angemacht und die Lautsprecher, da aber keine Panzer zu sehen waren handelte es sich “nur” um einen Anschlag.

Unsere Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi liegt direkt am Bosporus und es ist beeindruckend, mit einem Getränk im Garten zu sitzen, Asien in Sicht zu haben, einige riesige Dampfer vorbeiziehen zu sehen und mich mit vielen alten Freunden zu unterhalten, die man eine lange Zeit nicht mehr gesehen hat.

Das Football Tournament gestern hat wie immer großen Spaß gemacht, vorallem wenn von zwei Seiten die Gebete über Lautsprecher den Platz beschallen. Mein Team war nicht erfolgreich (1:3 und 0:4), dafür aber mein Ehrentor quer über den Platz hoffentlich sehenswert.

Unser Konferenz-Talk über das Bearbeiten von eingehenden Benutzerrückmeldungen und Fehlerberichten (”Bugtriaging in GNOME”) war schlecht besucht, da er eine Stunde vorgezogen wurde und dies in den ausgedruckten Programmen nicht berücksichtigt wurde. Wir werden ihn daher spontan morgen wiederholen. Zudem habe ich Probleme, E-Mails abzurufen und zu verschicken sowie IRC zu nutzen. Ich sehe schon den Berg an Emails, der Anfang nächster Woche auf mich wartet…

• Neuer Laptop. Windows XP komplett zerschossen beim Installieren des Grafikkartentreibers. Allerdings auch keinerlei Motivation, das zu reparieren. GNOME/Linux auf der anderen Seite durch das Kopieren meiner alten Daten auch so zerschossen, daß ich weder Symbole noch ein Menü mehr hatte. Unterhaltsam: Nach einem strace auf Nautilus als Test-Benutzer ging dann auch wieder in meinem echten Benutzerkonto alles. Nein, ich will das alles gar nicht verstehen. Viel wichtiger ist doch, dass ich meine Ximian- und Microsoft-Sticker auf dieses viereckige Modeaccessoire rüberbekomme und eine passende schicke pinke Laptoptasche finde, oder? Wer kommt jetzt mit auf die Loveparade?

  Insgesamt aber mal wieder sehr beeindruckt gewesen, wie zeitsparend es ist, daß man jegliche Software zentral mit einem Klick installieren kann. Ich verstehe nicht den Masochismus, sich unter Windows wie im Jahre 1995 auf irgendwelchen (ggf. noch nicht mal vertrauenswürdigen) Internetseiten die ganzen gewünschten Programme einzeln herunterzuladen und auch noch selbst installieren zu müssen.

• Deutschland vs. Türkei - bla bla, Integrationsdebatte, beide Fahnen an Autos, schon genug drüber gelesen, innenpolitisch, ich weiß. Habe allerdings gestern die Wirkung auf gerade nur für einige Monate in Deutschland verweilende Menschen bemerkt, die ziemlich beeindruckt davon waren, dass hier anscheinend multinationaler Patriotismus einigermaßen unkompliziert funktionieren kann. Und das in Deutschland!
• Der verbreitete Werbeslogan “Geldkarte/Euro-Führerschein rein, Drogen raus” für Zigarettenautomaten ist eine Lüge, mit einem tschechischen Euro-Führerschein geht das schon mal nicht. Konsequenter nächster Schritt wäre, den Aufdruck auf den Zigarettenpackungen zu erweitern: “Rauchen: Bitte nur Erwachsene und Deutsche”.
• Wer Ironie findet, darf sie behalten. Oder noch besser: “In diesem Blog verbreitete Meinungen geben nicht die Meinungen meiner Arbeitgeber oder Regierung wieder.”

The Maemo Bugzilla scope

Currently Maemo Bugzilla is used as a bug tracking system for the “core” software elements shipped in the Maemo platform (to define the term “Maemo” itself, please see this discussion). This includes both Open source and Closed source components preinstalled on the devices by Nokia. Obviously this does not include stuff like Skype or Rhapsody - they have their own bugtrackers.

And there is Garage Tracker. It is the bugtracking system for all those products based on the Maemo stack, but not preinstalled on the devices by Nokia.

In my opinion and in the long run, Garage tracker should die. Maemo Bugzilla shall be the main bugtracking place for all products based on the Maemo stack. I just didn’t like working in Garage Tracker (have to admit that I just took some quick looks to synchronize the status of reports that were duplicated in Maemo Bugzilla). It reminded me a lot of that awful bug tracker that Sourceforge provided when I had a small software project hosted over there, but it may be only my personal opinion that Bugzilla is easier and better to handle than Tracker is.

So I wonder: Are Garage project maintainers happy with Garage tracker?
Would they be interested to track their bugs in Maemo Bugzilla instead? My (not even reasonible or founded) dislike of the Garage Tracker is entirely my personal opinion after working with several bug trackers in the past. I want your opinions - It does not make sense to think about this too much if everybody is fine with Garage Tracker.

And which projects should be handled in Maemo Bugzilla? Keep it in the current state, as described at the beginning? Open it up for everybody interested in using Maemo Bugzilla to keep track of issues in his/her Maemo based software?

The latter one would bring up the next question that Quim raised in the famous bug 630: Are then the apps preinstalled in a device, »maemo compatible applications«, a different layer sitting on top of the maemo software platform? Stuff to think about…

(Also posted this to Internettablettalk.com and to the Maemo-developers mailing list. Let’s see if I can manage to streamline the feedback. )

General stuff

Besides reading and triaging the new incoming bug reports, I have spent the last days/weeks cleaning up the bug database. I’m done with bugs with high priority and critical severity set, currently I take a look at any non-enhancement bugs, especially old bugs (this means: trying to reproduce it myself, querying for internal tickets, or asking if this is still an issue).
But now that Diablo is out I expect more incoming bug reports than the approx. 30 reports per week that we had for the last months. Give us your Diablo feedback!

Less incoming bug reports.

In 2008 (the last 163 days), 31231 reports have been opened and 29997 reports have been closed in GNOME bugzilla so far.

This means that for the first time we get significantly less reports than the year before. How comes? GNOME less buggy, less users? Probably not.

We have many crasher reports going by default to crash.gnome.org instead of GNOME bugzilla. This is a Google Airbag installation that is already in use and receives hundreds of bug reports, and no-one cares about because it is unusable, missing debug info for nearly every distribution on this world, and pretty unmaintained. I’ve asked for documentation a few times before GNOME 2.22.0 was released, but nothing has happened. There is no possibility for distributions to submit debug info to extract useful stacktraces. Only advantage I currently see is that we are not flooded by bugs anymore in GNOME Bugzilla, but we’re losing track on those issues that really count, because we cannot see the stats and numbers of the issues filed to crash.gnome.org - it’s a big black hole and some bugs there already have hundreds (thousands?) of duplicates.

Another potential reason for less reports: A long time ago, Ubuntu has switched to report by default to Launchpad instead, but now that Bugzilla automatically rejects incoming reports from old releases (=< 2.19.99) this finally makes a difference.
And all this means…? More spare time for bugsquaders! Code! Hobbies! Love! Ice cream! Real life, here I come!

Gimmie bugs.

GNOME Bugzilla continues to get flooded by Gimmie crasher reports (especially bug 475020, we can auto-reject most of the Gimmie problems but not this one) that haven’t been fixed for months.

And now I realize (thanks to cosimoc!): “After a talk with Gimmie creator Alex Graveley, due to his shortage on time to maintain Gimmie, he allowed me to fork Gimmie thus starting MAYANNA.” and “to not ruin the Gimmie name we decided to branch it. Alex is also a Project member of MAYANNA”. Can somebody explain to me why just branching Gimmie was not an option? So one avoids ruining a software project’s name by completely abandoning any development and progress on it? (Keep in mind: Gimmie [applet] was proposed for GNOME 2.22 by its maintainer.)
A fork makes sense if several people cannot agree on aims. But I don’t understand it if the main project seems to be dead anyway.
The first thing that translation team maintainers is told is to resign when it is time. I originally had this in mind, but maybe this cannot not be applied to a maintainer that has written the entire software project on his own, like in this case. So, can we call Gimmie officially unmaintained and dead? If so, we may warn translators to not waste their time, and we may auto-reject any Gimmie bug reports in GNOME Bugzilla and close all existing bugs as WONTFIX. Currently it’s just the feeling of wasting time to see people triaging all those incoming Gimmie duplicates but nobody cares about the reports, that’s why I blogged this.