andré klapper's blog.

at guadec, some people took a look over my shoulder to see me triaging (and Don told me about the correct pronounciation). of course the bugsquad sometimes teaches triaging to interested newbies in #bugs, but it was even more fun to explain stuff “in person” to muelli sitting next to me for example, or to discuss tips and tricks with other squadders (as long as claudio does not eat my cookies in the meantime, but of course he would never do). and people asked me to blog about it. now it’s october, and i’m late, but better than never:

a year ago i started to write a greasemonkey script that makes triaging faster in several points, and now i found time to clean up the code a bit (it’s still messy, but i never said that i wanna be a coder when i grow up ;-).
basic features:

• add a “stacktrace” anchor link to the top of the page so you can directly jump to the signal handler call by clicking only once, and then compare two traces by quickly switching between the two browser tabs:
• 
• add additional product- or distro-specific stock responses for some products that get a lot of reports, so it’s easier for reporters to install the right debug packages – for example, i also have “english, please!” or “this is not a support forum” stock responses for evolution bugs, because… i need them. sigh…:
• after clicking on the stock response, set keyboard focus to the “save changes” button to save the time you would need for scrolling otherwise
• reduce the width of the area containing the stock answer links. i have a big screen resolution and i like short ways

here you go for download (but be careful, it may eat your cat). feedback welcome, just send mail. (answers to possible questions: “i have only tested it in firefox, there will be problems with other browsers”, “no, the stacktrace anchor link cannot go upstream due to technical reasons”, “no, we don’t want individual answers for every single module and i don’t think it’s the way to go, it’s been just my personal workaround for some special cases and i thought it could be interesting for others too”.) thanks to nazgul for improvements and comments.

additionally, i have to say that having a laptop made triaging significantly faster for me too, because switching between keyboard and mouse on a desktop computer takes so much longer than using a touchpad and the keyboard which has only a few inches in-between them.
and i use keywords in firefox: you can open http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=100000 by entering “bug 100000” into the address bar, you only need a bookmark with the keyword “bug” and the address “http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s”. you can add keyword “q” to quickly get to the query page. and so on…

for the last months, the bugsquad started to add the STACKTRACE keyword to crasher reports with pretty perfect traces. useful evolution and nautilus reports should more or less be completely marked with that keyword now, so that hackers and contributors can find and fix crashers more easily. the keyword is especially useful for modules with a large income of reports and few developers/manpower, combining the querying with the latest version number. perhaps there’s some people around interested in marking good gtk+ crasher reports, and some other folks in fixing them?

i’ve added a few more resolved bugs to the auto-reject list so we get less dup reports. we still miss some information to track changes with regard to the number of rejected reports, so now that we reject reports from 2.16 distributions, i saved a copy of the auto-reject list to compare the numbers in a month, to find out which crashers don’t exist in >=2.18 anymore. easy one.

it’s amazing to see that we have a lot of bugsquadders currently (tom, susana, pedro, nazgul, bruno, diego, philip, muelli, cosimo, wolki and those that i’ve forgotten). i still wonder how we manage to create interest in this unpleasant repetitive gruntwork triaging work, but currently it looks like we’re successful in that. perhaps it’s time for me to look out for new challenges (and finish my studies to get a job). :-)

dear GNOME project,

all my best wishes to your 10th birthday!
about 5 or 6 years ago we met for the first time: me, another stoopid user that could not get his modem to work under windows 98 anymore (and had to use something else because of that), and you, one of the desktops of my distro at that time. yes, i was young and i did a lot of wrong things (KDE, BeOS), and at the beginning i was only using you, but you did not care. but as time passed by, i asked for more, and you answered quickly and politely (probably one reason why i stayed – rodo, diký moc!). we’ve come a long way, baby, and you got cool folks involved.

now you probably will have a busy wednesday, together with your bugsquad and some more interested folks that will hang out on irc to celebrate a bugday. but after that looong wednesday of killing bugs, you will have well deserved the fancy cake that i’ve drawn for you (without using the gimp or inkscape). bon appétit!

maintainers

don’t forget to add new files with translatable strings to POTFILES.in/POTFILES.skip, otherwise those new strings will not be caught. quickly check http://l10n.gnome.org/module/$MODULENAME to get a list of those files (they are listed at the top of the “UI translations” section under “Notices” – if there are none, you’re a good maintainer(TM) and deserve a cookie.

translators

GNOME’s translators are very creative with regard to working around bad strings. however, it seems that they are way too friendly by not filing bug reports against modules with hard-to-translate strings. why?
are you keen on trying to translate “Read” (“has been read”? or “something to read”?), “Profile” (“a profile”? or “to profile”?) or “%s at %s on behalf of %s” properly by try&error guessing, or do you love spending time on reading the source code?

you’ve got better things to spend your time on! there aren’t many bug reports on translation issues in gnome bugzilla, which surprised me. so please file bug reports against the affected modules and add the “L10N” keyword, and if a string definitely has to be rephrased then please also add the “string” keyword to your report. help the developer to understand your problem, by linking to a good explanation, e.g. if a comment would help to understand how to translate a string, add a link explaining how to use comments, if a sentence is splitted up, add a link to your bug report to the explanation why this is bad behaviour. it only takes you a minute and will help everybody to get a better localized desktop.

everybody

if you like your favourite desktop and want to give some of the love back, why not getting involved by helping your translation team?

just take a look at the webpage and write an email to your translation team leader that you are interested in getting involved (if you do not receive an answer to your email within two weeks, please complain to gnome-i18n mailing list and CC the team leader on your email, because this should not happen.).

we have a webpage that provides wonderful statistics about which modules are in need of an update – choose your language, click on “GNOME 2.20 (development)” and then click on the icon of a module. then take gtranslator, kbabel, poedit or your favourite text editor to make the translation perfect again, then let the team leader upload your file, that’s all. easy, eh? :-)

languages in need of more translators

for my guadec talk (page 15f.), i compared the translation stats of 2.14 to those of 2.18 to find out which languages probably need more manpower. beside of course those languages that have always been on a low level, the following languages with more than 50% ui translation have lost quite a lot:
nepali (-20%), albanian (-14%), indonesian (-12%), czech and croatian (-11%), romanian and nynorsk (-10%).

also, i wonder whether those translation teams that have 99% ui translation (and therefore obviously enough human ressources) but less than 3% documentation translation (arabic, dzonghka, macedonian, hungarian, catalan, finnish, lithuanian, danish, japanese, vietnamese) could perhaps also translate a few docs for 2.20? we all know that a fully translated ui is much more important than having translated docs, but perhaps, perhaps some people can spend an additional little amount of time on translating the doc of their favourite application (again: if new translators are interested – of course feel free to join and help, see above).

general disclaimer: if you do not like translating, but want to help making GNOME even better: there are also many other ways how you can get involved.

post-guadec

“and now for something completely different.” looks like some of the issues that i described in my guadec talk are on a good way now:

• willem is interested in providing better analysis tools for bugzilla, something that could make it easier to analyze/identify bottlenecks and the quality of our modules and services. looking forward to it.
• if i remember the last guadec evening correctly (we were all so damn busy with fixing the showstopper bug 455415), don told me that somebody talked to him about working on providing a better tracking of our documentation status. i don’t know if it’s the same thing as gil described here – vertimus, used by the frenchies, looks quite advanced, compared to the stuff used by the dutchies (i don’t remember the exact url, this one here is for the docs) or germans.
  yes, one evening at the etap, we introduced the systems used by the translation teams to each other. that’s why guadec is so cool.
• i’d like to thank danilo for addressing our gtp bottleneck.

also, i ran into willie walker (working on orca, gnome’s screenreader) on his last evening at guadec, who paid me a nice compliment. thanks, man!

i’m a pretty happy camper currently.

• congratulations to the tracker crew – bug 403752 has now become number one in the all time statistics. though it has been fixed in svn for nearly 3 months now (2007-04-30), the maintainer(s) is unable to either release a new version (0.6.0) or to isolate a patch that could be backported to the distros to stop this flood. mart (who is one of the brave guys triaging that one) told me that he has increased his gnome bugzilla points from 7 to 17 just because of marking duplicates for this one. by average, the bugsquad closes 7 dups of this one per day (!).
  jamie, maintaining your project does not only mean to write new code all the time, it also means to take care of those bugsquaders that support you. i would probably be less pissed if i had not been told for five times in the last three months so far that a new release will be done “within the next two weeks”/”at the next weekend”/whatever. last answer was “this weekend”, we will see what happens (or not). at least it’s highly unprofessional behaviour and not acceptable.
• libsexy’s bug 354559 is still second worst in the duplicates statistics of non-fixed gnome issues. after waiting for six months, we now have a nice trace since one month. i’ve send two emails to the maintainers so far, no reaction. david, christian, please fix it and attach a patch for backporting it to the distros. thanks.
• guadec has been very productive yesterday evening with regard to eliminating whiskey and south american drinks. please continue.

NP: Lupe Fiasco: Kick, Push

guadec, birmingham.

currently at birmingham for one week to attend guadec, the gnome conference. my plane from cologne to birmingham had a delay of more than four hours, and i dislike waiting for a long time at airports (i know that already), but at least i was officially allowed to use the power sockets somewhere near some stairs, directly in front of the security check-in, so i could spend the time working.

when i arrived in the uk, i was first of all reminded of the fact that the uk is not part of the schengen agreement and that i had to queue up to show my passport when entering the country. it was way after midnight so there was no public transportation available anymore. i shared a taxi with two other folks that had been on the same plane, and got off at my hotel (note to google maps: your birmingham map is wrong, please put the hotel location where it actually belongs to. yes, i want mapy.cz for whole europe!). the rooms are fine and it’s pretty nice to sit in the entrance area/breakfast room, combine adapters with multiplicators with multiplicators with multiplicators to have at least 15 computers on one electricity line and finally break two of the power sockets at the wall. one elevator was also out of service, i wonder when we will have succeeded in burning down the hotel.

one receptionist asked me last night what all those people are about, and that all those computers look so “intellectual” (err… it’s the very first time i heard that term about geeky folks). i tried to provide a very basic explanation of what gnome is about (world domination?), but the word “code” did not tell her anything and even the comparison with that other “operating system” out there did not work out (i asked if she would run windooze on the family computer, but she could not remember). so i tried the olpc-some-of-us-are-working-on-a-better-world explanation and since then i think she’s a bit more confident with all those geeks sitting here at late night, blocking laying the tables for breakfast. ;-)

the conference so far has been cool, happy to see old friends again in real and to run into people that you had talked to on irc but never seen before (for example the south american bugsquaders and also some sun china a11y folks). the venue seems to be some kind of a concert hall (there are also small chambers where people can exercise playing the piano) and a few associated rooms and buildings next to the town hall. big advantage: carpet nearly everywhere on the corridors (gimme the real, dirrty hacker feeling!). the number of power sockets is acceptable, and the wifi can be stable sometimes (depends on where you are, there are rooms at the venue where it’s quite alright).

the city? to me it seems that birmingham did not have a reproducible urban development concept within the last decades, the town center and the pedestrian zone look okay though. you can find a camera nearly everywhere, for criminal prevention and for your own safety, of course. hmm. i have another definition of freedom.

my talk.

my talk today was fun and my first guadec talk ever. after sayamindu worked around the classic resolution problems of my laptop (thanks!), i talked to about 25 people in the audience. my talk was about using statistics to see the state of some fields of gnome. gnome already has some nice stats in the fields of translation (l10n.gnome.org), documentation and bugzilla, but i miss(ed) some statistics so i partially tried to gather the data, e.g. changes of translation rates or maintainer changes within the last year, amount of and response times for freeze break requests, missing announcements and so on. i also showed a bit of bugzilla’s auto-reject feature and how many reports have been rejected so far, so people get a basic impression what’s possible and especially what’s not possible currently. though i was mostly personally interested in finding some things out, i guess that the sheets should be interesting for translators and the bugsquad, and perhaps also for documentators and the rest of the release-team:

Where’s my monitoring at? (PDF, ~1,5MB)

i’m still missing some conclusions from the data that i have gathered, but we will hopefully reach some progress on those fields. i am looking forward to some related talks (for example fer’s talk, and the patchsquad bof).

and no, i have neither sit next to claudio, nor did he eat one of my peanut cookies. good guy!, as well as vincent who uploaded the sheets of my talk to his webspace… dĕkuju a dobrou noc!