Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

I have been working on this a few times, together with merlin1991. Talked with Pali about it too a few times.

Last time I cleaned out the repo and database as far as I could, but it seems there is still a something lingering. This all started because the package maintainer changed numbering scheme a few times, triggering a really hard to find issue in version number comparison. I easily spent more than 2 days fixing all kind of related issues, but there is still a problem.

I've told Pali a year ago that he could fix the issue himself by just changing the name of the package. This way he didn't need to wait for any fixes, but he decided against that.

There is still a problem in the packages interface with this package and it is almost impossible for me to find and fix the bug. There is only one package in the whole repo affected by this, I feel we should not waste any more time on this and just cut our losses. Rename the package and be done with it. The time wasted on this can be better spent somewhere else.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

I've spoken with Pali a few times on IRC, he missed me a few times as he pinged me in the evening/night. I tend to be mostly online during central European business hours.

I can't recollect seeing any PMs or emails for that matter from freemangordon.

Haven't been reading the forums that much, just because of the sheer volume of messages/signal to noise ratio. Bootstrapping apps.formeego.org and harmattan related stuff took a lot of my time.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

I was trying to reach you on IRC, but iirc last time I have success was by the time we were discussing co-maintainership for CSSU repos(somewhen July-August 2011). Anyway, I really don't want to go into dispute who is right/wrong, I am glad to see myself out of the ignore list. Lets focus on the real problems.

One of them being kernel-power package name. There is rationale why Pali refuse to change it, there are just too many other packages depening on kernel-power, I don't think there is a way all of them to be actively maintaned so their dependencies to be changed accordingly. So a change in kernel-power will make all those packages incompatible with "kernel-power-new" or wathever fancy name we put on it. I am sure you can imagine the mess.

Could you please share the link to the code of the function which is responsible for package version comparison, after all we are developers dealing with much harder to find bugs than a glitch in some string parsing python/php/whatever function.

EDIT:

An ugly and nasty, but working hack, will be to add a code that checks for that particular package name and deal with it accordingly.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Now that's what i could call "constructive" (both from x-Fade and freemangordon), in opposite to what "some other official guys" wrote earlier when community rep / infrastructure issues were mentioned (basically, just general blah blah).

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

I tried this now in the importer. It imported the package now, but I can't guarantee that it won't get stuck somewhere else. Let's see if that is the case :)

I now special cased the 50 version, so it works for the current version. The hack would need to be updated next time though.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

So far everything looks OK(but lets Pali confirm), thanks. Anyway, I will ask for the code of the offending function again, so we can check if there is some kind of a workaround for the problem. I mean - is it possible to change the version for the next kernel-power in such a way so it won't trigger the bug.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Sorry if that offended but that's the general tone I got from some statements and that was not aimed at you or anyone else directly. It really doesn't make any difference if one has been a member of the community a month or 6 years and that is no reason to judge anyone. At least I don't see "hey n00b" -culture here which is great. My motive was to try to get discussion going and getting problems resolved which seems to be working. I don't know why that didn't play out earlier but the important bit is that something is happening now.

Anyway. back to the QA thing.. So what would be the preferred way of cleaning the queue and making sure it doesn't get stuck so easily again? Automated promotions doesn't seem to be the answer but what about the other way around I proposed a bit earlier that if the the maintainer doesn't promote the package into extras within a month after the promotion is unlocked the package is automatically removed from testing?

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

The main problem exists because we need to compare versions in MySQL. As is not possible, we create an index where we give the version numbers a certain weight. Here

Anyway, the problem might go away when the version in Extras doesn't have the old numbering scheme anymore.

If we ever move to OBS, we can leave this whole code behind :)

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Why would you remove the app from testing? If the app has passed the quarantine, has enough proper votes (both from Testers and Users) why won't you promote it?

If you do that, you won't have waiting applications in Testing but in Devel.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

True. What I'd like to see is the queue and it's pass through time getting shorter and I'm just throwing in ideas.

There where some good arguments against automated promotions so I proposed this. Personally I'm still more in favour of the automated thing since if a maintainer puts a package to testing and it passes QA it should be promoted. In case of "developer's remorse" of putting it to testing - it could be handled something like if the maintainer votes down the package then it's removed from testing regardless of what the other votes say. The QA quarantine time gives the maintainer some time to do this.

In either case the queue should be much easier to handle. I'm not saying that these are the only options. I'm sure there are other possible solutions out there.

Edit: It also might be worth considering that packages require at least N votes from supertesters or something to be promoted. This is to guard against getting the more popular packages through without proper testing

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Just logging in to state this - before any of you are attending the 10 april meeting, please read through the minutes and logs above and understand that for any given community-hosted service/app store there is a range of problems.

We'll try to set up a meeting on the 10th, it wasn't directly decided as noted in the e-mail but we'll probably have a sync to move things forward. Mer-general archive and information is at http://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Mailing_lists

Some problems:

1) Cost of hardware and handling donations, including checks and balances, setup of legal entities
2) Legal implications (who gets the nastygrams) if we distribute patented or otherwise copyrighted material we aren't permitted to distribute because of a user uploading it.
3) Who contributes and maintains support for the various build targets (Mer, MeeGo, Harmattan, Fremantle) within the OBS.

For 2), from Mer point of view, we're a proper open source project (soon with some non-profit established) with no legal department or corporate hosts that can easily fight back when we get attacked because of random-user's upload of some pirated ROM in a N900 NES emulator to a community OBS.

That is also noted in the minutes that we're working to find a way to do this without risking Mer's core mission and Mer's ability for others to build upon it without worrying it'll go away due to a legal threat.

The other side of the coin is that such shared services are needed to properly grow communities, because in this world, it's not enough to just put up a repository, you need to provide security updates, make it easy to find the software, not just your typical output of a SDK.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Great. What I meant is that maemo should discuss what we want before the IRC chat. I'm sure the people from Mer, KDE, etc., would appreciate if we didn't take up their time in the meeting talking about internal maemo topics.

Anybody who cares to comment, I would really like to understand better what this change implies for the future of maemo. Of course, IRC is not necessary for this - we can do it asynchronously via forum or ML.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Agenda for April 10 meeting, at http://www.mail-archive.com/mer-gene...msg00413.html:

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Correct. So far so good.

However it also made me the package maintainer for Diablo, and retroactively applied that error to existing packages that I never touched, taking away the credit from the people who did the actual hard work. I'm not necessarily arguing for resources to be spent fixing it (if no one cared in 2010 it's way too late now) but surely that isn't working "like it should".

Then someone else came along and uploaded new versions (I didn't mind at all btw, that's not the point) from a different account but without remembering to change the Maintainer field: and the system accepted them just fine and gave me credit for those too :-/

So if one wants to take over a package without the previous maintainer's approval it doesn't seem like much of a problem.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Guys, again: it's great that we're all passionate one way or another about this or that aspect of the discussion, but I ask again that the rhetoric come down and stay down a few hundred degrees. There's just no point in picking at old wounds, especially when the causes look to be more perceived than real anyway, and pissing contests are better held in Off Topic..

Thanks for your understanding. I really, really don't want to moderate this thread.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Noticed that too, it felt really weird -- to see the maintainer approval request for a package with the same package already being on the "Latest builds" list. (So much for QA! :D )

Btw, OBS Diablo target anyone? I could give that a few minutes... if I ever manage to get a working OBS virtual machine appliance ;). It is probably harder than a few minutes though...

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Appreciating Your good will (no irony here), but what exactly are You referring to? It seems to me, that this thread is quite meritocratic, and much less emotional than "council Election" was just few pages ago.

If You don't want to "point finger at", I'll also be happy via PM answer with example. Really, I'm not trying to argue/being ironical, just wanting to understand what You exactly mean.

/Estel

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Sorry, I think some guys are asking too much from Maemo developers : that the packages will have warranty of future updates to be promoted to extras ! Future for 1 year ? 3 years ? It is nonsense...

The package that is in extras-testing, is well voted and tested, IMHO, should be automatically promoted without the maintainer. If a critical problem/bug is found in any extras software (with or without maintainer), the super-testers could have the hability of removing the software (in very rare cases).

Do you guys think that all software in Maemo.org extras, Nokia Store, App Store and Android Market have current maintainers ?

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

I was thinking of more than one thread, but for the most part you're correct: this one is ok overall, but I saw one example of things possibly heating up again. If you read through you should see it, but if need be I can PM the link.

Back to the discussion...

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

No. I just would be more strict on promoting clearly abondoned packages currently stuck in testing to extras. Open source software has the usual "as is" warranty and at least I'm not pushing to change that at all. It's more about discussion on what is considered stable (enough) for extras.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Timo,

I've given you rights on testing squad as requested and posted a message to the mailing list.

May I suggest that people interest in clearing out the queue of packages stuck in testing follow the mailing list. Things tend to get lost amongst all the chit chat on the forum.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Thanks. I already started going through the packages beginning from the easier cases.

Edit:
there's also a brainstorm entry on the issue which we can still use to figure out a solution for this.
http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...omoted_timely/

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Logs from Community OBS meeting:

http://mer.bfst.de/meetings/mer-meet...16.00.log.html

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

It seems that there is a problem with latest Cleven package. It's not reaching the repository, maybe it's something similar to old KP problems.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

second try gave a better error. http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=564

hope it is useful

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

A proper bug report assigned to Niels (X-Fade) may be useful to watch and follow.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

No need since it seems to be there now.
http://maemo.org/packages/package_in.../cleven/2.5-2/

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Yes, followed the proposal of freemangordon to resend the same package and this time it worked.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Hi X-Fade,

We have an issue at Maemo.org package interface. Apparently it's not possible to promote applications to Extras if they depend on non-free packages. We have discussed the question in latest Council meeting and agreed that the rule should be avoided. Could you please take a look to it and see if it can be fixed?

This is blocking further improvements to package qt-components for Fremantle. Now that Nokia has granted permission to package Harmattan icons and Nokia Pure fonts, they could be used as dependencies to improve compatibility of Harmattan applications in Fremantle.

Please see original issue at TMO. I have created bug 12630.

Thanks in advance

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Can you elaborate? I thought non-free packages can be promoted at will by the maintainer?

I'm not sure what the issue is, but if it's the disposition of otherwise free packages that depend on non-free ones, it's a big one that should be discussed more widely (preferably on maemo-developers). One option would be to introduce a "contrib" component for those as Debian does.

This for instance is plain wrong (it should be in non-free, according to the content's licence). The free repositories should only contain freely-redistributable packages. If this was done so something that depends on it can also go in free then it's doubly wrong!

I don't see the permission there, just a reference to "previous posts" but there are none in that thread. URL?

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Apparently the problem is when you want to promote an application that is in the free repository, but depends on non-free packages. This issue was raised by inean, regarding the use of non-free stuff from Nokia combined with qt-components for Fremantle.
We need response from X-Fade as we really don't know if this is a predefined rule, a bug in the promotion mechanism or simply, we are plain wrong and there is not such issue.

In fact, it's quite common to have free packages such as an open source game engine, depending on non-free stuff such as the game data, that might be re-distributable but non under an open license.

My suspicion is that we have some packages that should be organised in that way not properly classified.

Right, and probably is not the only case of non-free stuff packaged in the free repository. I suspect that a lot of old-times games are in that situation.

Yes, his previous posts are located elsewhere. Let me search for them and I will add them here for future reference. Anyhow, reading his post in the context of the thread, it's clear that he's giving permission to distribute that stuff.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Right. The way Debian deals with this is "contrib", perhaps we should also have one?

Well, the fonts are not even re-distributable according to the licence I see in the .deb. So seeing that in free scares me, people should be able to for example mirror free without having to worry about Nokia lawyers knocking on their doors tomorrow.


Hm, perhaps we should perform an audit then.

If it's a blanket re-distribution licence I'm fine with it, but I suspect it comes with strings (for example only for use on a Nokia device, or only for non-commercial use). In any case the full terns of the licence should be included in debian/copyright.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

It seems that Fremantle autobuilder is down.

We are also experiencing some problems with c-obs, though I don't have the details yet.