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.

After spending three holidays in Amsterdam (rainy but still a wonderful time) we moved from our hotel to the Openismus apartment on the evening before the summit started. Great to see the friends/colleagues again, plus only 5 minutes of walking to the venue.

As my laptop had died directly after arriving in Amsterdam this was a good chance to test whether Modest is an acceptable replacement. I ran into three issues: Not possible to mark several messages at once as read, no threading view (really important if you get lots of Bugzilla mail and want to read the previous one), and no option to search for a message (and not just in the one message that you have selected).

Conference opening was nice. Jim Zemlin’s keynote (Linux Foundation) was a bit too much for me though, sounded like “Linux will have 101% market share next year because it’s better than everything”. Qole interviewing Ari Jaaksi had a good moment: Ari stated that having two bugtrackers does not make sense in the long run. Good to hear that common sense is shared.

I was content with my talk about the current situation of maemo.org bug management (boring slides here, video hopefully later).

Now that Nokia handed out 300 N900 pre-production devices to the folks at the summit, maemo.org Bugzilla has been flooded with new reports. Most of them have a good quality (seems like developers know that being exact in the initial description saves everybody’s time) but still it looks like more than we can currently perfectly(TM) handle so we need more help in the long run.
Let’s see how the next weeks go, especially when average users have found their way to maemo.org Bugzilla and start filing their issues. Keep in mind that for many it will be the first time to do this, hence let’s be friendly and explain some triaging decisions whenever it makes sense (”Thanks for reporting this. This has been already reported.” or “Thanks, but this is not a bug in the software itself. Please go to http://talk.maemo.org to receive help in this case.”).
As said, help is always welcome.

Photo by thp4, CC licensed

Stats

On 29 Sep 2008 there were 1076 open tickets (including Website). Now there are 658 open tickets (including Websites, excluding Extras). That of course does not mean that difference of 418 tickets has all been FIXED (some reports became WONTFIX or got closed due to lack of response of the reporters when asking for more information), but it shows that there’s activity, feedback and that reporters can expect that somebody cares about their issue.

In the last 12 months 1501 reports have been filed (including 3rd party Extras apps, without it’s only 651). That’s normal average (10/2007–09/2008: 1690; 10/2006–09/2007: 1269). Curious what the number for the next 12 months will be though.

Nokia

What has only improved a bit is getting Nokia developers to work in the community instead of with the community. Big thanks to those trying it already.
It’s the Nokia management that has to allocate developers’ time for this, and it’s the community that has to convince with arguments why it’s better for everybody (simply imagine managers and developers used to commercial closed source development, e.g. the S60 series). I won’t elaborate in this paragraph; in short: I do hope to see improvement here after Fremantle (Maemo5) launch and by having some discussions at the upcoming Maemo Summit.

Misc

• We’ve opened Bugzilla to also provide bugtracking for some 3rd party applications hosted in the maemo.org Extras repository.
• At the end of last year the structure of the products and components was reorganized to better match user expectations (”Hmm, where should I file my issue?”) plus also the organization of internal Nokia developer teams. That was a bit like trying to square the circle but I think that the compromise is pretty good.
• Additional to Stephen’s awesome weekly Maemo Bug Jars I started providing a monthly Feature Jar that only covers the enhancement requests in Bugzilla, published on the maemo.org mailing lists and in talk.maemo.org. It’s based on the votes for each request, so if you have a application-specific wishlist item that is an affair of the heart to you go vote for it in Bugzilla (if it’s platform-wide it’s better suited to file it in the maemo.org Brainstorm).

Future

• Planning the changes required for Fremantle (adding new products, changing some descriptions etc) is basically finished. Next is to add all this and set it up once the final Fremantle version is available.
• Porting the Bugzilla codebase to upstream 3.4 version – ongoing (currently working on CSS). Ferenc has been a huge help codewise so far. I owe him quite some beers.
• Regular bugdays. See next paragraph.

Bugsquad

I’ve already blogged about changes and expectations related to the N900 launch. One more thing that I’d like to add: After the N900 launch I want to start having monthly bugdays – the maemo.org Bugsquad is a great way for people that want to get involved but don’t necessarily want or know how to code. Bugsquads constantly need fresh blood as they always tend to “lose” members to the evil, evil codewriters fraction.

You

So what are your impressions and expectations with regard to maemo.org Bugzilla?

(Picture by Dženan Šehić, CC licensed)

Exactly 20 years ago the West German foreign minister announced that the thousands of East German refugees were allowed to leave the Prague Embassy to West Germany.

The video (click here if the embedded version does not work) still moves me to tears and reminds me that freedom is not made up principally of privileges, but it is made up especially of duties.

Just came back from the wonderful Vypsaná fixa album release party to see that there is yet another great GNOME major release available. Go check out the improvements and changes! Made to share!

Work on GNOME 3 is ongoing, of course.

(Picture by padro82, CC licensed)

So, what can we do?

The maemo.org community should be welcoming by being helpful, friendly and patient. Open-source culture is different compared to “normal”, closed-source corporate companies, both in positive and negative terms.

Nokia should help making the Maemo platform successful by improving working in the community instead of just with the community.
Nokia developers should not only be allowed, but encouraged (keep in mind that many Nokia developers don’t have an open-source background) by their managers to spend a few minutes every day on the public mailing lists, in the maemo.org forum, in maemo.org Bugzilla.
At the beginning some might think that this is a waste of time, but sharing technical knowledge that Nokians have, plus talking directly to users and 3rd party developers is crucial for the success of the platform.
And Nokia should provide good public API documentation, of course – in the past, time for this has been missing sometimes due to tight schedules.

maemo.org is a nice vibrant community, ready to grow.
Maemo is a platform with great potential.

Let’s welcome new folks and give them a good reason to stay with us.

Photo credit: mcclouds (Creative Commons)

Sometimes I wish GNOME had a bounty program (either separate or integrated in Bugzilla) so I could say “If you code this as an Evolution Plugin and it gets accepted by maintainers you get xxx EUR”. That idea is obviously still missing mentors that help the coder with implementation issues though.

Evolution Mail Composer

Current Dropdown:

New Dropdown:

New Context Menu:

Evolution Contacts

Currently:

New, with context menus:

Module proposal period for the next GNOME release has started!

If you are a maintainer of a module that you want to propose for official inclusion in GNOME: Do it now! See the wiki for the guidelines. Also note that you will receive slightly less negative feedback if you avoid using deprecated modules (libbonobo/ui, libgnome/ui, libgnomecanvas, libart_lpgl, gnome-vfs, libgnomeprint/ui, esound, orbit, libglade) and deprecated Glib and GTK+ symbols.

And now another (last?) GNOME 3 status update before 2.28 will hit the streets…
See also the cleanup stats and the 2.27/2.29 schedule.

Killing Bonobo

If I got everything right I could create the following categories for the GNOME modules that still depend on Bonobo/Orbit:

• A11Y
  
  This seems to cover orca, dasher, gok, mousetweaks, accerciser and gnome-session. At-spi, gnome-mag and gnome-speech might die and get replaced by at-spi2, gnome-shell and speech-dispatcher. libgail-gnome has already died by getting integrated into gtk+ (Orca was the last consumer and got fixed two weeks ago).
  See here for a general overview.
• gnome-panel
  
  gnome-panel blocks the Bonobo dependencies of bug-buddy, gnome-applets, seahorse-plugins, pessulus, sabayon, gdm, and empathy. It is likely that gnome-panel will get replaced by gnome-shell for GNOME 3 (but there is no final decision yet).
• Evolution, Evolution-Data-Server, Evolution-Exchange
  
  Evolution and friends just branched for GNOME 2.28.x so the kill-bonobo and dbus-hybrid branches now can get merged into (unstable) master. After that it will be a bit easier to see how much work is left.
• gconf
  
  Probably very ugly to fix. dconf might be quite ready (but developers a bit too silent in communicating that). Crossing fingers for a status report. It could also make sense to switch to the gconf-dbus branch in the meantime.
• Legacy
  
  • gnome-python-desktop (as a binding)
  • glade3 (as a tool to create applications)
• Other modules that are not officially part of GNOME
  
  Wondering about atomix, balsa, ghex, gnumeric, gossip and gthumb.
  Bug reports are mostly filed (yes, we also do care about warning the maintainers of modules that use deprecated functionality and are not officially part of GNOME despite of sometimes unfriendly “I don’t care about your GNOME3 stuff, why did you file this at all?” answers).
  Planner has a patch awaiting review/commit.

Killing deprecated GTK+/Glib symbols

• gnome-games currently looks worst. It depends on the release of a new ggz tarball now that ggz patches have landed.
• metacity seems to be in need of more love – patches welcome which might be partially shared with mutter.
• gedit is a bit reluctant to get in the patches too early because it would change UI behaviour. Understandable.

Killing libglade

The aim for August 24 is to have less than 10 modules still depending on libglade. Currently we still have 16 modules left (only very few of them blocked by the gnome-druid migration that has to happen first). If you want to help you should provide a patch. Here’s a how-to.

Killing libgnome and libgnomeui

Apart from the bindings there are not many applications left (yelp, gnome-control-center and gok got ported in the last days), but we all know that the last steps are always the hardest ones, right?

• libgnome:
  evolution, tomboy, gconf (just removing an unused file).
• libgnomeui:
  evolution, evolution-exchange, gnome-panel, gnome-shell.

A gnome-shell release

A fresh and cool tarball is now available.

Killing libgnomecanvas

Evolution heavily depends on libgnomecanvas. It is highly unlikely that this code will be rewritten for GNOME 3 so libgnomecanvas can either be kept deprecated but shipped in GNOME 3, or Evolution copies the code to its internal codebase. Note though that libgnomecanvas itself heavily depends on libart_lgpl which is also deprecated.

GSeal

A rather unknown variable in the current equation as GTK+ does not have everything in place yet, hence it is currently still a moving target. See the wiki for more information and how to compile your module with the GSEAL macro. Maintainers are highly encouraged to try.
In general curious about the GTK+ status with regard to version 3. Hope to see an update about this next week.

Personal opinions on interesting modules

Modules that interest me and that could be interesting for GNOME 3 or later in alphabetic order and without any claim for completeness are:
dconf, gnome-do, gnome-global-menu, gnome-packagekit, gnome-scan, gnome-shell, tracker, vala, zeitgeist.
Just wanted to write this down somewhere as I tend to empty my brain on a weekly basis.