Archive for the ‘lang-en’ Category

Checking and updating old Maemo bug reports

Friday, March 27th, 2009

How up to date are the bug reports?

There’s currently only 5 open non-moreinfo Apps/Platform tickets left with version field set to a version earlier than 4.0.
That’s quite cool because it means that there’s nearly no non-updated bugs left about Bora or earlier – stuff that’s not being worked on anymore anyway. Having an up-to-date bug database is important to see what issues are still relevant, so help is welcome to check whether tickets filed against Chinook still apply to the latest Diablo version (5.2008.43-7) by simply adding a comment and updating the version field.
But even more helpful is to check if tickets still apply to Fremantle. This can be done for some Platform issues by using the Fremantle SDK alpha.
There’s currently 38 open Platform tickets with the version field set to Fremantle, but this also means that there’s 267 open Platform tickets with version field not set to Fremantle.
The maemo.org Bugsquad is waiting for you – even if it’s only one small bug that you check, it definitely helps improving the platform and is appreciated! :)

Fremantle SDK alpha

Very late to blog about this, but some people might have seen that I’ve created a few more Target Milestones (5.0-alpha, 5.0pre-alpha) instead of the generic “Fremantle” one when the Alpha SDK was released. This should make everything a bit more transparent by having exacter information on when a bug was exactly fixed.

GNOME bugs: Bits and pieces.

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

More news to come in the next weeks, e.g. a schedule for 2.27.

New year = Time for some Bugzilla stats.

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

maemo.org Bugzilla.

And GNOME Bugzilla.

2008.

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

It’s been a great year with lots of interesting changes (e.g. job and SO).
Christmas was a good time to reflect. I’m very thankful to God for my life, and to my family and old & new friends for all the good discussions and talks I had.
But as I love music, grew up with MTV (those early nineties when they actually played video clips) and hence am unable to read long books or concentrate on anything that takes longer than 4 minutes I won’t write much lines but prefer to list those songs in alphabetic order that I listened to a lot in 2008.

My private soundtrack – it reminds me of some moods I was in. (Warning: Explicit lyrics and/or video content. And it’s really about the sound – some of the video clips are quite bad.)

Peter Fox: Alles neu / Amanda Jenssen: Amarula tree / Joy division: Atmosphere / Brett Anderson: Blessed / New order: Blue monday / Vypsaná fiXa: Darling / The knife: Heartbeat / CLP feat. Tunde Olaniran: I’m so trill / MIA.: Mausen / Einstürzende Neubauten: Nagorny Karabach / M.I.A.: Paperplanes / Ignite: Poverty for all / Glen Hansard: Say it to me now / Klub des loosers: Sous le signe du V / The gossip: Standing in the way of control / Justice: Stress / Chemical brothers: The test / Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip: Thou shalt always kill / MGMT: Time to pretend

Voting for reports in maemo.org Bugzilla

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

Explaining how to Vote for a bug report, as I’ve read a few complaints in ITt and in private mail.
Voting is helpful to identify the main issues that the Internet Tablet users and maemo.org community members have.

Log in to maemo.org Bugzilla and go to your favourite enhancement request or bug report. For this example I’ve chosen bug 1693.
Screenshot
Click on “Vote for this bug”.
This will bring up a page displaying all of your votes. Now enable the checkbox next to “Enter New Vote here” and click on “Change My Votes”.
That’s all. Of course you can also change your existing votes.

Screenshot

Yes, also from my point of view the User Interface is a bit confusing, hence blogging about this.
For a related discussion on how to handle feature requests see the ITt thread.

Watching products in maemo.org Bugzilla

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Every component in Bugzilla has a default QA contact (a virtual email address with the suffix @maemo.bugs, not completely implemented for Website bugs though, but finished for software bugs). To find the corresponding address for a component, go to the overview page, click on a product, and get the list of its components and its Default QA contacts.

Yesterday and today I fixed the mail settings for these virtual accounts (about 80% of these accounts had mail delivery completely deactivated). Now any changes to a bug report in component X will always send an email to X’s Default QA contact, now for all the software components we manage in maemo.org Bugzilla.

Why is that useful?

Because it makes it easy to watch bug reports in components that you are interested in, e.g. if you are a developer or a triager.
Log in to Maemo Bugzilla, go to your Mail Preferences, scroll down to “User Watching”, and add the Default QA contact’s email address to your watchlist. Now you will receive all bugmail about all changes to any reports of a specific component.

While doing this, I’ve seen that some folks were and are subscribed to QA contacts that had mail delivery deactivated. This means that a few community members and Nokians will suddenly receive a lot more bugmail than before, and maybe about components they are not interested in anymore. To fix this it’s the same as above: Edit your Watchlist and remove the stuff you are not interested in. Nevertheless expecting a few complaints on Monday when checking my mailbox (I’m off for this Friday). ;-)

Enjoy.

bugs.maemo.org reorganization done.

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

I’ve spent this Saturday on reorganizing the structure in Maemo Bugzilla (this was planned for several weeks). From my point of view, it will make it much easier to add future components/products without cluttering too much. For interested Nokia developers, it should be easier to track bugs (by e.g. adding the virtual QA contact to one’s email watchlist) because the new components fit better to the working areas of internal software teams. For the reporter, it’s hopefully easier because we e.g. gave the Home applets and the Utilities explicitly their own components.
Making it easier both for bug reporters to find the right product/component and for developers to track their components is like trying to square the circle, but I think we have a good compromise here.
I’ve also introduced a category named “X-Graveyard” which includes the “product” “X-Discontinued”. Stuff that is not shipped/not worked on anymore will end up here – less clutter in queries and products.

General progress

The decreasing numbers in Stephen’s weekly Bug Jars have already shown the nice progress we’ve been making in cleaning up two years of mostly ignored bug reports, though I must admit that a good part of the reports that were closed are either unfortunately “WONTFIX” or “FIXED for Fremantle, but not in Diablo”. This is not the perfect solution from a Diablo user point of view (and has led to some discussions and complaints), but I prefer to honestly forward this Nokia feedback (and receive some flames, though I’m not the one making these decisions actually) instead of continuing to just ignore the reports. You too, probably. :-P

Stats showing the Clean up progress

As you know I forward “valuable” reports (good steps to reproduce, tested with the latest public version) to Nokia’s internal bug tracking system, hence it’s interesting for me to see how many reports exist that do not have an internal reference yet. (Development platform bugs are handled in Maemo Bugzilla only so they don’t count here.) You can help reducing that number by taking a bug report that does not have an internal reference yet, reproducing it with the latest version and adding a comment about this. Even if it’s only one bug – it helps improving Maemo.

bugs.maemo.org Reorganization

Friday, November 7th, 2008

Product Reorganization

The current organization of Maemo Bugzilla has some flaws. I won’t repeat the reasons here, see for example the Getting Nokia involved in bugs.maemo.org wikipage if interested.
Quim has come up with a helpful draft for reorganizing the products and components that has received several iterations now after integrating my own ideas and analyzing structures and components in both Maemo Bugzilla and Nokia’s internal bugtracker. In short: Split applications from the underlying platform, and getting prepared for where to add the new Fremantle products (like Meta Tracker or clutter).

Implementing this means to move a lot of components from A to B. This will trigger thousands of emails. While a few Maemo folks will hopefully send me some chocolate, most average people will hate me for spamming their mailboxes. So I prefer doing this on one day and completely disable sending Bugzilla mail (and probably add a warning banner one week in advance on every Bugzilla page).

I want to get this done before the Fremantle Alpha SDK gets released. Comments on the draft welcome.

Virtual QA Contacts

Bugzilla provides the concept of having QA Contacts and Default Assignees on a per-component level (components like Bluetooth are a sub-level of products like Connectivity are a sublevel of a categorization). QA Contacts and Default Assignees are just “users”, and every user in Bugzilla has an email address that does not need to be a valid one, let me explain:

If you are interested in getting all bugmail for a specific component, you subscribe to the email address of the particular QA Contact by adding it to your watchlist in your Email preferences in Maemo Bugzilla.

Currently there are lots of QA Contacts and Default Assignees ending with @maemo.org and some newer ones with @maemo.bugs.
Problem: foo@maemo.org email addresses exist in reality. It’s a bit unlikely that an individual will apply for the email address browser_bugs@maemo.org, but nevertheless it’s IMO bad to use an existing real domain.

Instead, I prefer to constantly use aliases with the non-existing top-level domain “.bugs” (like browser_bugs@maemo.bugs) – this is also what GNOME Bugzilla is doing by using a -maint@gnome.bugs suffix, and it has worked out quite well. (Another nice side effect of using alias is that you don’t have to reassign all bugs when a developer in a company moves on to maintain a different component – instead the former developer just removes the alias from his watchlist, and the new developer adds it to his watchlist. Less bugmail noise for everybody.)

So I’d like to harmonize this, one big problem though: Some of these addresses might exist in reality. If e.g. “sdk_bugs@maemo.org” is a real user and not a virtual one, and I change this to “sdk_bugs@maemo.bugs”, sdk_bugs@maemo.org will of course not receive any emails anymore. Need to take a look which of these users are correctly marked as inactive and probably check for the rest of them. :-(

Feature Jam (Go vote!)

Published a very first Feature Jar for the community and Nokia product managers one week ago. It’s rough and will soon receive another iteration. This is planned to happen monthly now. Keep in mind that Nokia handles feature requests differently from “real” bugs (other persons to contact), hence this is seperate from Bug Jars.

You can raise your voice by voting for existing bug reports and enhancement requests (much prefered to “I want this too” comments)! Every bug report has a “Vote for this bug” link. Use it! Also see the My Votes page for more information.

Cleaning up

I’ve also been spending some time on triaging dozens of old bugs (bugs, not enhancement requests) to continue cleaning up. There’s still enough reports that have never seen any comment added though, and sometimes I even have to close valid non-critical Diablo issues as WONTFIX because the issue will not exist in Fremantle anymore (radical code changes) and because the corresponding Nokia developer teams have already moved on to spend their time on Fremantle only except for critical issues. I always feel a bit sorry for this, but I understand that a company has to set priorities on where to use manpower and resources…

However, I think we’re on a good way – if you want to help, just pick up an old bug and try to reproduce it with the current Diablo. If it’s still an issue, update it by leaving a comment and setting the “Version” field to the version that you have used for testing. If you can’t reproduce, also add a comment telling us the version you’ve used and the steps you took to reproduce. Even if you only take a look at one bug, it’s an appreciated help! Also see the Bugsquad wiki page for more info in general.

I got home from the club, switched on TV and Barack’o was president.

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

And I felt confident.

(Yes, there are also fields where I would have prefered McCain, but to sum it up: It’s probably better for this world. “Don’t forget the T it follows liber in the constitution”, to quote NOFX.)

Propose new modules for inclusion in GNOME 2.26!

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

This is a GNOME Release team service announcement.

Yes! We want you to think about potential new modules for 2.26.
If you’re a maintainer, go wild and propose your favorite new modules for inclusion in GNOME!

How to propose a module? Click here.

The new modules proposal period will end on Monday November 24th at 23:59 UTC.
We expect discussion to heat up about those proposals at the beginning of January and to reach a decision around January 12th.
Also note that early feedback&testing help maintainers/developers to work on issues. Don’t start testing in January so developers don’t have time anymore to work on concerns.

More information about the GNOME 2.25 release cycle.