Just booked a one-way flight to Brussels, not decided yet how and where to go back.

First of all some Nokia-internal changes with regard to Error Management, then maemo.org Bugzilla moving to a new server. Unexpected side effect was data loss. Spent part of last Monday restoring what I still had in my bugmail. Still it leads to confusion and mistrust (”Why was my account deleted?” – “You probably created it in that data loss time frame?” – “Ah.”).

Then we had the Maemo5 PR1.1 release on Thursday (with a nice ChangeLog) and some problems on Saturday and Sunday, hence bugmail (change notifications) was not delivered.

Sharing other thoughts on broader issues that are currently on my mind:

Before writing the very first bug report (maybe even of your life) it’s recommended that reporters take a look at the How-To. Good bug reports save everybody’s time and issues get fixed faster. We should put this information on the first Bugzilla page to avoid frustration on both sides.

Also the number of incoming reports is constantly high, hence I am sometimes short with my comments (as I also have to take a look at the internal comments for public tickets, verify some reported issues in newer internal versions, keep stuff in sync, and other stuff). Depending on cultural backgrounds some of my comments might be misinterpreted as unfriendlyness.

For the high workload Ubuntu has a nice approach called 5 A Day which is asking community members to triage five bug reports a day. I’d be happy with any number though.
On a related note, for some reasons I expect more Nokians to be around in maemo.org Bugzilla after the next feature release (PR1.2) has been published. Looking forward to it.

Another problem is that many normal users don’t understand the difference between a bug report and a forum (I’ve blogged about this before, anyway). That’s predictable if you’ve never seen a bugtracker before, but if everybody wants Nokia to be more present in maemo.org Bugzilla and folks actually reading bugmail and responding, please reduce adding comments on what is helpful and avoid unneeded fullquotes or answering above the quote.
Especially if instructions how to provide further information have been posted already adding just another “I have this problem too” comment is unhelpful and creates bugmail noise in everybody’s inbox. Bug reports with hundreds of comments, mixing up issues with similar outcome but different reasons quickly become unreadable so the same questions or comments get reposted plus subscribed people tend to ignore new comments. Of course this is also a question of providing better information on how to provide logs etc – should spend time on this in the next weeks.

In general of course reading before posting is required, but people are lazy. “If this is RESOLVED FIXED, then why do I still see that issue here?” It’s explained that FIXED does not mean PUBLISHED, but we could consider renaming FIXED after having Bugzilla 3.4 in place, as it confuses many people. Red Hat for example calls an internal fix “RESOLVED ON_QA” in their Bugzilla until the fix is really available for public.

So that’s the reason why I educate people ask people to please “behave”. Sometimes I scare some people or maybe have less friends at the end of the day, sometimes people are fine with what I’m doing.
In any way it’s necessary, I just felt a need to explain my intentions in public after a bit of negative feedback in the last days.

• maemo.org Bugzilla 2009 stats
• GNOME Bugzilla 2009 stats

Röyksopp and The Dø to mention separately, because both albums are just marvelous. Quite unfair to pick just one song here.

Miou Miou – À l’été de la Saint-Martin ‘68 / School of Seven Bells – Connjur / Depeche Mode – Everything counts (Oliver Huntemann & Stephan Bodzin Dub remix) / Paul Kalkbrenner – Gebrünn Gebrünn (Berlin Calling Edit) / N.A.S.A. ft. Kanye West, Santogold, Lykke Li – Gifted / Dear Reader – Great white bear / Unkle – Heaven / Dragonette – I go around (Midnight Juggernauts remix) / Black Eyed Peas – I got a feeling / Yarn:moor – It’s blooming / London Elektricity – Just one second / Friendly Fires ft. Au Revoir Simone – Paris (Aeroplane Remix) / Lady GaGa – Pokerface / Metric – Sick muse / Lady Sovereign: So Human / IAMX – Spit It Out (Designer Drugs Remix) / Hell – U can dance / David Guetta ft. Kelly Rowland – When love takes over / 2raumwohnung – Wir werden sehen (Paul Kalkbrenner Remix)

• Killing libgnomeui: gnome-panel
• Killing libglade: gdm (patch available awaiting review), gnome-media (initial patch exists, but help and feedback needed!), sound-juicer (patch available awaiting review), mono
• Killing libgnome: tomboy
• Killing libgnomecanvas: Evolution
• Killing Bonobo: Currently blocked by gnome-panel, the new A11Y infrastructure (which is on a good way), and for gconf by the proposed desktop wide move to dconf/GSettings for 2.31.
• Killing GlibDeprecatedSymbols and GtkDeprecatedSymbols: Moving target…
• Cleaning up GTK Includes
• Use GSEAL: Moving target as per pending sealings and missing accessor functions. Maintainers: Please do take a look at your module(s) by compiling with -DGSEAL_ENABLE!

And in the extended basket:

So, what did I forget in this quickly written list?

Nice to see more and more modules getting Introspection Support.

Worth to consider: XDG config folder implementation.

Also I’d like to give a big “Thanks” to Javier Jardon for working like mad by both filing bugs and providing patches in these fields, especially when it comes to GTK+.

Trying to summarize:

Initially, Lucas brought up complaints received about content posted on Planet GNOME which triggered a discussion whether there should be rules on appropriate content, whether an annual reminder should be sent to blog authors aggregated to Planet GNOME (telling them that they can remove themselves if they don’t feel fine with it anymore), and whether GNOME has “lost” people because of reasons that could have been avoided.
RMS joined the discussion and Philip disagreed with him. RMS then wrote that people should not post about closed source on Planet GNOME and defined his “most minimal support for the free software movement” . Because of the obvious disagreement, Philip consequently proposed “to have a vote on GNOME’s membership to the GNU project”. Dave warned that such a vote “could cause a lot of harm & discord for the GNOME community” which was answered by Philip.

So far my summary.

Other folks may find other postings more important than the ones I’ve picked – feel free to read the entire thread yourself to get your own opinion.

Now some questions come up here:

• How is “membership to the GNU project” defined? Was “FSF membership” meant here maybe? Is there a public document?
• Is KDE nowadays such a “member to the GNU project” too? If not, why not? Did KDE try or consider applying for it? Links to potential past KDE discussions appreciated.
• Wikipedia states that “the Linux kernel is not part of the GNU project” which leads to the question: How important is it for the GNOME community to have GNOME being a member to the GNU project? (As a sidenote, the term “GNOME” being an acronym is obsolete, just to avoid a useless discussion about potential project name changes).
• I wonder if members of the FSF’s board of directors agree with Richard Stallman’s opinion that Planet GNOME “should not invite people to talk about their proprietary software projects just because they are also GNOME contributors”. As clearly written, “Planet GNOME is a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors” which also covers activities outside of GNOME, may it be philosophy, hunting, music, non-free software or anything else, as long as blog authors have some relation to GNOME. For technical news there is always GNOME News.
• Which influence do FSF members have on FSF decisions? For example the Windows7 campaign got some bad feedback within parts of free software communities. How transparently are decisions made in the FSF, e.g. deciding about such campaigns? Who is involved? Are there public archives (URLs)?

Sorry if answers exist out there and I have been too lazy to search or have not found them yet.

With regard to my current personal opinion (which may of course change as I’m willing to learn), having read Richard M. Stallman’s recent posts on the foundation mailinglist, he remains a fascistic extremist to me, painting black & white, ignoring reality (with a bad impact on free software user experience if you cannot interact properly with closed source products that obviously do exist out there) and trying to exclude folks from the GNOME community (because they also work on VMWare stuff) because he knows better what’s good for the GNOME community.

RMS has done great work in the 80es and 90es that I really appreciate, but I prefer to forget about his last years (a bit similar to Michael Jackson actually), especially his GCDS keynote in 2009 (yes, I have to come up with this again, because it’s part of the picture). RMS was a non-funny comedian with jokes that can easily be interpreted as sexistic (to me they definitely were, though that most probably was not his intention), trying desperately to auction a GNU puppet by behaving like on a children’s birthday. Okay, one can probably discuss humor here. At least it was not my type of humor. If GNOME ever invites RMS again to a conference, I prefer to stay away and not go there. It’s simply not the community that I want to be part of and proud of.

I always tell myself that RMS does not speak on behalf of the entire FSF, as the FSF has good intentions. But good intentions don’t count if the actual acting and outcome is bad. Plus organizations normally are reflected quite well by the leaders that were elected to represent them.

So yes, the discussion might be definitely less heated if the request to not post about closed source on Planet GNOME had been posted by a different person than RMS, as he himself is controversial enough already. Plus for many people, FSF = RMS.

A general note at the end: “Freedom” to me is also the personal freedom to tolerate and even to use non-free software from time to time, without having a big issue if it fits my needs way better. (For potential “Then help the free software to become better!” comments: I talk about the present here, not about the future.)
And I have enough friends working on closed software. They are awesome people. They just have a different concept that I totally accept because I’m not in a position to say “My concept is the only right one and superior to any other concept”. I prefer to let history decide on that instead.

Great to see the interest on Maemo in the last weeks. As expected, traffic in the forum, in Bugzilla and in Brainstorm has increased impressively.
Discussions have been taking place (with regard to Bugzilla for example here or here) how to make infrastructure work out better for users, with some good proposals. I am also impressed by the patience and friendlyness towards new folks not searching for already existing threads or bug reports, partially pushing the limits of english grammar and punctuation, or towards folks having wrong expectations (Symbian is a completely different codebase than Maemo, hence talking about “regressions” is technically speaking wrong. If you want all of the Symbian functionality and lose some of the Maemo functionality, just get a Symbian device if it makes you happier). On a related note, I’m also trying to keep Bugzilla a technically focused place and make clear that it’s not a forum (”WTF???” comments are counterproductive noise if you want developers to read maemo.org Bugzilla mail, really).

Two issues that have been on my mind lately:

• I am afraid of Nokia doing the same mistake for Maemo5 that was done for Maemo4 – evolving and supporting a platform just for a few minor updates which is bad for the ecosystem around. “Maemo hasn’t had a chance yet to gain real long-term stability. The life-cycle of a Maemo version is too short for that, and there is no continuity between versions.” If 3rd party developers are unsure whether to write their new great application in GTK (abandoned for Maemo6) or Qt (not yet ready for Maemo5) they in doubt don’t write it at all and might support a different platform instead.
• Also, there must be improvements with regard to contributing (patches or even co-maintenance of modules). It’s too unclear where to find which codebase. Garage? Stage? Gitorious? Is it free or closed? Glad to know that Stskeeps is working on it as part of the maemo.org Sprints (ID: 9.11-04).

Open source community expectations are about taking (Give me the code!) but also about giving back (Let me provide patches in Bugzilla and have maintainers review them!).
Tarballs are available in the repositories, but hackers normally prefer the fresh code instead.

Photo by brentdanley, CC licensed

I’m proudly announcing the first maemo.org Bugday:

This is a nice way to get involved if you are a fan of the Maemo platform and the N900, but cannot or do not want to write code for example.

Bugdays are about hanging out together on IRC, triaging/discussing some reports in maemo.org Bugzilla, and introducing new people into triaging. No technical knowledge needed, no obligations. So, step by and say hello to the Bugsquad.

And now to some other bits and pieces:

• We’ve become stricter with regard to having non-trivial enhancement requests filed in Brainstorm instead of Bugzilla. To avoid reporter frustration, a note about Brainstorm when entering a bug report will be displayed in Bugzilla soon (Karsten is looking into this).
• New shiny Bugsquad logo by wazd (see above). Thanks!
• Published and updated version of my small maemo.org Greasemonkey triage helper script. Happy to share this.

Incoming reports in the last weeks

As I’m quite busy with the normal “Triaging and Syncing” business already (as seen above, a first increase of bug reports happened right after Maemo Summit in week 41, but I expect way busier times ahead) Karsten concentrates on technical stuff. It’s good to have him back as now stuff gets done that unfortunately was on the backburner.
First pay-offs (small, but definitely worth to mention, not only for the sake of transparency) that were done because I could “outsource” this to Karsten:

Entering a new report

Having users/customers reporting a bug in order to improve a product is great (always keep in mind that they do not need to spend the time on that). However the freetext input makes this sometimes complicated: A “Steps to reproduce: Connect to foo.” is vague when there are several ways offered by the UI to connect to foo and only one of these ways triggers the bug. Also, some testers (me, for example) love to simply follow braindead exact instructions without the need to think a lot.
Hence Bugzilla now asks reporters to use an ordered list to provide exact steps. Yes, it is helpful.
Also, when it comes to reproducibility of issues an answer like “Sometimes, but not too often” is always a bit vague and does not tell how often the reporter had tried (once? five times?). Now we ask for numbers like “maybe 3 out of 10 times”.

New “Moved to Brainstorm” answer

Closing valid enhancement requests as INVALID just because they are better suited for maemo.org Brainstorm always sounded a bit rude. We now have a MOVED resolution plus a nice one-click-button-and-done implemented.

And third, we have a link to the Bugsquad on the maemo.org Bugzilla frontpage now.

More news to come.

After collecting some feedback, the GNOME Release Team has finally decided on the release date for GNOME 3.0: It will be September 2010.
To take a look again at the GNOME 3 plan that was released in April 2009: Click here.

New module decisions for GNOME 2.30 were also made of course.