MeeGo conference San Francisco

I went to San Francisco (US&A) to play Ping-Pong with Chris (I also recommend him as a tour guide – he knows the city). At the same time a conference took place.

At the weekend’s preconference I discussed MeeGo L10N with Margie. I cleaned up the wiki before, but still there is enough to still sort out:

• no rules for starting a translation team or conflict management
• No deadlines / String freezes / decision processes for break approvals
• For GTK based modules, developers often forget to add an entry to the LINGUAS file when adding .po files
• no instructions for Gtk Internationalization for Developers (the GNOME documentation might be helpful here)
• The GLS prefix in bug summaries is confusing (it stands for “Global Languages Solutions”) – some plans to change this.

The most important talk from my point of view was Carsten‘s “Transparency, inclusion and meritocracy in MeeGo: Theory and practice” showing some of the transparency problems that MeeGo has not only after one of the two bigger companies involved announced a change in direction.

There was also a Release Engineering BoF. A great opportunity as so far I had been totally unsuccessful in understanding how this works in MeeGo. This has not improved yet though. It looks like decisions are made completely in private in the offices of one company (Intel) instead of the public (internet). Other issues: The Submit Request account process is not documented – how to contribute from a new company? You’d expect something other than dead silence here. But it was agreed on that the CCB (Change Control Board) process for MeeGo 1.2 was completely invisible and “crap”. (Dawn might now complain about my use of language, but this was the wording used by those running the session.)

But the original reason to come here was MeeGo’s Error Management (EM) and Quality Assurance (QA). I outlined some EM and QA issues to discuss on the meego-qa mailing list before the conference took place. See the summary of this BoF. Hoping to see further discussions of issues in the public, as agreed upon.
Iekku and I gave a talk on the basics of bug handling. Plus Eric and Stephen presented some cute Bugzilla extensions but I leave it to them to blog and email about it (a good task as they have been too silent and invisible so far).