andre klapper’s blog.

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!

Time to finally blog about what Karsten and me have been doing for the last weeks in Maemo Bugzilla. Karsten has been mostly looking at the infrastructure and code side to improve a few things and will blog about it once we have some results ported from the test installation to our work installation. In general we have to give Kudos to the hackers of GNOME Bugzilla that we were used to work with - it has nice convenience and statistics features (though everything can always be improved of course) and we want to port a few of them.

I myself have spent most of the time cleaning up bugs. This includes syncing the status of reports that have been duplicated to Garage tracker and Nokia’s internal bug tracking system, reassigning reports of people that have left or moved on to other fields, nagging and setting NEEDINFO state (well - “moreinfo” keyword in fact) on bugs that need more information from the reporter, and correcting priority and severity of crasher reports.

In the past, Maemo Bugzilla hasn’t received a lot of attention. Important, non-enhancement requests have sometimes been copied to the internal bug tracking system and been handled other there. To get a first impression on the existing criticism it was useful to read some rants and complaints (this may sound negative, but most of it was quite constructive).

Nokia’s internal bug tracking system works fine for their workflows. Nokia has a great internal error management process (milestones, well defined testing processes, fine-grained statuses etc). Totally different from the anarchistic bunch of spare-time hippie bugtriagers we are at GNOME Bugzilla.
And it’s a bit different from the open source software workflows that we are used to because it’s not transparent to non-Nokians, but I also have to admit the fact that the Maemo platform is bound to hardware that is provided and sold by a company that runs a business and has competitors.
In the long run, we have to discuss coping with the reports in Maemo Bugzilla itself and to better integrate our users and reporters. Information flow with Maemo Bugzilla reporters has not worked out well in the past and has led to entropy.
It will be a challenge to get developers to input in Maemo Bugzilla, but we will refine and improve with some time and increase transparency (one item of our 100 Days Action Plan). This will not magically happen in just a few days. It will also require changing the way some developers are used to work. “The theory is known, the practice is not that simple to implement” (to quote Quim here), but I have the feeling that we are on a good way and that the Nokia people are definitely willing to improve the situation by accepting some changes.

Our next steps?

To come up with a Triage Guide, to continue cleaning up the bug database, to discuss and improve the communication with Nokia developers, and to make Maemo Bugzilla a nicer place.
For a complete list (also of other Maemo community heads’ tasks), see the Maemo Sprint page for June.

…and don’t forget to file bugs!

Spent the last week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Prague. It was a pleasure to meet and see lots of friends and new people from the Ubuntu and GNOME universe. Technically speaking lots of workshops were a bit to Ubuntu specific to me (I mostly attended QA and Mobile sessions but do not run Ubuntu myself), but I hope that I could provide useful input with regard to upstream collaboration. Physically meeting makes it definitely easier to discuss problems and impressions directly instead of using IRC and mailing lists - I had a few talks about Nokia/Maemo.org bug handling, GNOME release team issues (with Vincent and Olav), general community problems and GNOME Bugzilla bug triaging.

(Crossclub, October 2007.)

At the non-technical side, especially the last two evenings were great - I shamelessly convinced a few people to go to Crossclub on Thursday and it seems that the majority really enjoyed it. The party on friday evening was awesome - both the Ubuntu band and afterwards our beloved DJ Daniel Holbach with his furious drum’n'bass set!

The downside: My laptop (which is my work machine and has always been broken, but problems have become much worse in the last weeks) seldom worked and even refused to boot most of the times so I had to use my N810 very often. This meant that I could not really work at the same speed I’m used to. Got to buy a new laptop this week to get back with full force to work on triaging and fixing stuff in Maemo Bugzilla, at least I fixed the missing In-Reply-To header for Maemo bugmail so threading in your email client should work now (thanks Olav!).
The current Maemo bugzilla database is messy, so the short-term plan for the next days is to sync bug report statuses with (duplicated/transfered) Garage tracker and internal Nokia bug reports while guenther is mostly looking at some technical issues to improve workflow. We will also start posting weekly reports and enhance them as time goes by (feedback welcome, like always - use mail or irc).

As already announced by Murray, guenther and me have started working on maemo.org’s bug database.

A quick introduction for the maemo folks (most GNOME folks should know me already):
I started triaging Evolution bugs back in 2004 when Evolution was still handled in Ximian’s Bugzilla. Since that time I have never really stopped triaging GNOME bugs, though the plan for 2008 was (and still is) to pass the GNOME triaging crown to a worthy successor (Cosimo, Gianluca, this one goes out to you!). Being a member of the release-team i also regularly try to identify showstopper bugs for major releases.

So, what can the maemo community expect from us?
(Simplified description with marketing buzzwords included:) Our task will be to improve the bug workflow and communication between developers and users, so in the end everybody is hopefully happier and more productive.
Right now i’m in the early stage of getting an overview on maemo.org’s bug database and finding out which options/tools are available that i am used to work with (workflows that i can copy/adjust or workarounds to get the information i want to retrieve), to identify the biggest problems (this covers both code and communication), and to get in touch with the maemo community - send mail, ping me on IRC (andre in #maemo on freenode), or come around and have a drink when you’re in town!