maemo.org - Talk - The bug tracking system sucks...badly

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Re: The bug tracking system sucks...badly

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201701)

I know there are better ways to ask for things. I didn't choose the worst. I chose to be clear and concise. No beating around the bush, no small suggestions, just saying it how I see it. It sucks. And I DID see the beta on AGPS. And no need to zoom? Ok, you pick out Kansas City on a map of the US with a stylus the size of an ink pen.

And I know I said one last thing too many times because I didn't want to flood the forum with threads.

I want what's best for the community. Right now, the bug-tracker is effectively ineffective to someone like me who likes to browse and see what I can help with. I don't spend my days searching for issues that I think might possibly pop up. I want to see the issues staring me in the face.

And one last thing, Usually the repositories the program resides in also contains all necessary dependencies. You shouldn't have to tell it, that's my point.

It's just the tone that puts you in bad view.
This kind of tone puts everything good you said or suggested a part.

I suggest you to provide feedback to the bugmasters as someone else already suggested here (don't remember the nickname).

As for the AGPS-UI you need to just provide a rough location of where you are. Not an exact city.
And this is something you should add to bugzilla, you hate it or not.
If it's a duplicate of a bug, it'll be noticed when assigned and resolved.
BTW, I think they're already working on alternatives.

Re: The bug tracking system sucks...badly

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

What is the point of a bug tracking system where you have to search for problems instead of reading about them? A person should just be able to hit Bugzilla on the Maemo homepage and see a list of bugs. That way, issues that need fixing get visibility. Look at the tracking system that Ubuntu has with Launchpad.

I'm interested in getting more Internet Tablet users involved in submitting, adding information to, and voting upon bugs, so I'd like to read your ideas for improvements. Your posting conveys a great deal of passion, which is a wonderful driver. I'd appreciate it now if you could step back and provide some detail so your speed can be made velocity.

I see the landing page for the Ubuntu bug tracking system displays a list of 75 out of (at the time of this writing) 47,312 bugs. While the 75 do appear to be those bugs considered most important, it's not immediately obvious to me how this eliminates the need to search that mass of 47,000+ bugs. I expect the "Filters", "Tags", and "Release-critical bugs" selectors in the left column may be used to provide some focus. However, I question whether visually scanning a list of 2,937 "Tags" for a suitable choice provides any advantage over a search box.

Would you please provide more detail on how Launchpad is

Quote:

Excellent. Flexible. USEABLE.

and how maemo Bugzilla could be improved? I'd greatly appreciate it.

Re: The bug tracking system sucks...badly

Quote:

Originally Posted by TA-t3 (Post 201710)

Out of curiosity, which garage projects are those? The reason I'm asking is that every garage project I've looked at so far have Anonymous Subversion Access as well as Developer Subversion Access links. Maybe I'm not searching for the right projects..?

Why only subversion? why must you sign up for some projects? This is a Debian-based distro, is it not?

example of restricted access project:

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/maemotesting/

Re: The bug tracking system sucks...badly

Quote:

Originally Posted by anidel (Post 201713)

Well, I know I was being blunt, it's 8:30 am and I haven't gone to bed yet. No energy for fluff or ***-kissing.

It was more of a "What the hell, why did you guys let this place get so out of date and useless?" Kind of post. Look at it this way, the most active community isn't even the officially sanctioned community by Nokia. Nokia's IT-OS forum shouldn't even exist is is so useless.

There are two wikis, one that is unkempt and half-broken; one new one that is a pretty shade of white and nothing else at the moment.

But the one thing I just don't understand is how they've managed to get this far with a bug-tracking system that is utterly outdated, secretive, unintuitive, counterproductive, and just plain useless to anyone but the original bug submitter who gets zero community visibility because nobody knows his or her problem is even there.

In my opinion, which is pretty insignifigant, we should just use Launchpad so fixes for other distros get propagated to Maemo quicker and from a vastly larger pool of knowledge and to also harbor better interoperability with other software.

Re: The bug tracking system sucks...badly

I forgot to mention that there is a Launchpad area for Maemo, but the project name is cheese and there approximately 5 bug reports listed.

Re: The bug tracking system sucks...badly

@Mutiny: The wikis are two for specific reasons, discussed not so long ago in this forum.

Re: The bug tracking system sucks...badly

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

For lack of a better word.

That's an opinion that has a lot to do with perspective, I suppose. If you want to see a bug tracking system that "sucks...badly" see the Garage tracker.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

How old is it?

2005, it got a major overhaul in 2007 (thanks to timeless's hard work) and is undergoing a major overhaul as we speak.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

This is something that's somewhere on the list for improvement, but it's not really a simple procedure, as a lot of stuff needs to be ported over to our Bugzilla. The GNOME Bugzilla has essentially what you're talking about.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

That way, issues that need fixing get visibility. Look at the tracking system that Ubuntu has with Launchpad. Excellent. Flexible. USEABLE.

Out of interest, do you actively triage bugs anywhere? While Launchpad may be more inviting to some newbies, it definitely not as effective a bug tracking system as Bugzilla for the people that actually have to do the work.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

Even Bugzilla itself, in its latest incarnation by Mozilla is easy to use.

What about Mozilla's Bugzilla is easier to use? Concrete examples and suggestions for improvement go a lot farther than froth-at-the-mouth rants. We have two guys very able to make this stuff happen (Andre and Karsten, the new bugmasters), and we have a lot of people willing to help them out. My suggestion to you is to open up a task on the wiki. Drop the attitude and start getting together a plan for real improvements. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

Why must Maemo's be so convoluted and purpose-defeating? You click on Maemo's Bugzilla link and it brings you to a page where you have to SEARCH for issues? What? How does that accomplish anything?

Well, generally speaking, when you're dealing with a large volume of bugs, visual overviews aren't all that helpful. Searching with a few appropriate keywords tends to bring you what you want faster.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

Bugtrackers are there for a reason. Visibility, collaboration, and quicker resolution. Ours is akin to going "Hmm, I wonder if the ssl package in Diablo crashes MicroB whe you visit pages with Javascript? I think I'll search for it. That is bass ackwards.

Personally, I disagree. Searching is pretty much the only way to effectively get what you're after. It's certainly a helluva lot faster than browsing through almost 4000 bugs.

Think of it this way, though, the overviews Launchpad offers are just searches, and you can achieve the same sort of effect with custom searches in Bugzilla. There are three that I recommend everybody have a list of all bugs created in the last 2 days, a list of all bugs updated in the last 2 days, and (no link on this one) a list of all bugs I created.

From that, a useful suggestion you might want to put into your wiki task would be, "Include this search, this search, and this search as default saved searches (and as links from the front page for non-registered users). Then also embed this search and this search directly into the front page."

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

Oh, and what is it with all the Maemo future development projects in the garage closed to the general populous? Are you guys sharing porn and warez in there or something? Development should be open. Open development invites more innovation, better quality if finished product, and a fuzzy feeling.

Huh? Who is "you guys". This is clearly a Nokia question, but isn't really all that relevant moving forward, as they've already committed to alpha and beta releases of the Fremantle SDK.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

One last thing. Don't hide or password-protect your development repositories. That is idiotic. If you don't want the public seeing your unfinished product, then why is there even a repo out there?

Three big reasons, because it's hard to distribute software to global internal beta-testing programs completely internally, idiot users tend to freak out when they use beta software that's actually beta, and because there are many components of Maemo which are Nokia proprietary. Heck, I'm glad they did it this way. The community people that have the background to understand what a beta release means get access to it early, file bugs and help to make the release product that much better, while the people without the background to understand what they're getting themselves into don't get themselves into trouble.

Besides, again, this is largely nullified moving forward as they'll be releasing development versions of the Fremantle SDK.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

If you want to help Maemo fulfill its potential, stop putting up roadblocks.

Yes, generally putting up roadblocks to progress is a bad plan. ;)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

An example being the A-GPS app.

Uh, what about A-GPS Beta for Nokia N810 doesn't make sense to you?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

One last thing...Apt-get is supposed to solve dependency hell by getting dependencies for files you want to install. Why doesn't the package manager do this for me? A lot of stuff is non-installable because...you guessed it...missing dependencies! Well, then, why don't you go get them for me so I can stop being frustrated that I can't find your specific version of glib or whatever?

This is exactly how apt and the Application manager work. It has a list of places to look for packages, and installs those packages from them if it needs to. The question you're really asking is, "How can I make the package manager magical and precient?". Tell me, how is it supposed to find dependencies if you don't tell it where to look (i.e., the repositories you have installed).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mutiny32 (Post 201678)

Fix these things. Right now they are a waste of resources.:rolleyes:

There are lots of very active community people working on these things (both in their spare time and as part-time contractors for Nokia), putting down their work with flippant remarks like this doesn't help anybody. :)

Re: The bug tracking system sucks...badly

Quote:

Originally Posted by brontide (Post 201690)

Part of the problem is that bugzilla isn't the bug tracking system... it's the user venting system which is then distilled and copied over to an INTERNAL bug tracking system that we have no access to.

Yes, Nokia's decision to do the bug tracking on even their open components internally is an unfortunate one. Thankfully, this is something that's going to improve (and has improved a lot already) moving forward thanks to the tireless efforts of people like Andre and Karsten.

See bug #630 for a little background.

Re: The bug tracking system sucks...badly

Quote:

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles (Post 201795)

That's an opinion that has a lot to do with perspective, I suppose. If you want to see a bug tracking system that "sucks...badly" see the Garage tracker.

2005, it got a major overhaul in 2007 (thanks to timeless's hard work) and is undergoing a major overhaul as we speak.

This is something that's somewhere on the list for improvement, but it's not really a simple procedure, as a lot of stuff needs to be ported over to our Bugzilla. The GNOME Bugzilla has essentially what you're talking about.

Out of interest, do you actively triage bugs anywhere? While Launchpad may be more inviting to some newbies, it definitely not as effective a bug tracking system as Bugzilla for the people that actually have to do the work.

What about Mozilla's Bugzilla is easier to use? Concrete examples and suggestions for improvement go a lot farther than froth-at-the-mouth rants. We have two guys very able to make this stuff happen (Andre and Karsten, the new bugmasters), and we have a lot of people willing to help them out. My suggestion to you is to open up a task on the wiki. Drop the attitude and start getting together a plan for real improvements. :)

Well, generally speaking, when you're dealing with a large volume of bugs, visual overviews aren't all that helpful. Searching with a few appropriate keywords tends to bring you what you want faster.

Personally, I disagree. Searching is pretty much the only way to effectively get what you're after. It's certainly a helluva lot faster than browsing through almost 4000 bugs.

Think of it this way, though, the overviews Launchpad offers are just searches, and you can achieve the same sort of effect with custom searches in Bugzilla. There are three that I recommend everybody have a list of all bugs created in the last 2 days, a list of all bugs updated in the last 2 days, and (no link on this one) a list of all bugs I created.

From that, a useful suggestion you might want to put into your wiki task would be, "Include this search, this search, and this search as default saved searches (and as links from the front page for non-registered users). Then also embed this search and this search directly into the front page."

Huh? Who is "you guys". This is clearly a Nokia question, but isn't really all that relevant moving forward, as they've already committed to alpha and beta releases of the Fremantle SDK.

Three big reasons, because it's hard to distribute software to global internal beta-testing programs completely internally, idiot users tend to freak out when they use beta software that's actually beta, and because there are many components of Maemo which are Nokia proprietary. Heck, I'm glad they did it this way. The community people that have the background to understand what a beta release means get access to it early, file bugs and help to make the release product that much better, while the people without the background to understand what they're getting themselves into don't get themselves into trouble.

Besides, again, this is largely nullified moving forward as they'll be releasing development versions of the Fremantle SDK.

Yes, generally putting up roadblocks to progress is a bad plan. ;)

Uh, what about A-GPS Beta for Nokia N810 doesn't make sense to you?

This is exactly how apt and the Application manager work. It has a list of places to look for packages, and installs those packages from them if it needs to. The question you're really asking is, "How can I make the package manager magical and precient?". Tell me, how is it supposed to find dependencies if you don't tell it where to look (i.e., the repositories you have installed).

There are lots of very active community people working on these things (both in their spare time and as part-time contractors for Nokia), putting down their work with flippant remarks like this doesn't help anybody. :)

Well, I'm better rested and in a nicer mood, but not in a rant and rave mode.

What I'm saying about the package manager is that a lot of stuff can't be installed because the dependencies which the developers of the package didn't put into the repo. It DOES know where to look, but those deps aren't there and they should be. That just boils down to laziness on the dev's part and assumptions that its there somewhere.

The A-GPS Beta I can understand. But I do have to say, releasing something that even I, a well-versed user, has complaints about that the normal user would completely be lost in, like...how exactly is it aGPS? it is not tower-assisted and offloaded, and terra-location cannot be considered a legitimate definition of aGPS, because IPs are not statically assigned to geographical locations. I would call it more of a "GPS helper" than aGPS. A simple zip or postal code input or at least a map with some zoom and borders would infinitely make this program better and more useful.

A bugtracker where you have to search for bugs is not good. A private internal bugtracker for OSS should be immediately discouraged. I am familiar with Nokia's bad habits about this with my experience with supporting IPSO. When a fortune 50 company wants to see the bug and fix documentation from the devs who aren't allowed to release internal engineering documentation (Even though it's Berkley licensed) and you're stuck in the middle, things get ugly fast, especially in the case of IPSO 4.1 Build 016. This detracts from priority issues because nobody can confirm and triage bugs if they don't know they even exist or what the problem was. By the way, yes, I triage bugs. I'm not a programmer, but I try to help as much as I can in improving OSS.

And as for my pessimistic and resentful attitude? It's good to stir the pot sometimes. Complacency and smugness can harbor stagnation of a project and give some people a sense of superiority in their opinions over others. One thing I don't appreciate is an egotistical developer who can't be wrong.

Plus, sometimes harsh and realistic opinions can make people think, "Damn, the pot's starting to boil, I had better get off my *** and before we have an uprising."

I really think you are extremely level-headed, generalantilles and I respect your input on things, but sometimes you have to give some tough love.:)

But I still think hiding development code from the power userbase is dumb and should be discouraged and questioned at every corner. I understand some of it is propreitary and can live with that, but Nokia's going to eventually have to give it up to compete, especially with Google's promise of complete openness of Android by its release later this year and other rapidly encroaching fully open projects on the heels of Maemo. Maemo has to adapt to survive.

Plus plus P.S. And one last thing for this post, OSS is all about opinions and ideas. That will always lead to conflict. It's human nature. I think I'll stick around here some more and call Nokia, Maemo, and whoever else on what I see are faults.:)