Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

So apparently different parts of the community are having problems with the maemo.org infrastructure and policies? I'm starting this thread to collect the issues in a single place in hope of finding solutions. So in additon to the problem please also tell how you see it should be fixed or do you see a way to work around the problem. If you're just going to bash nokia, nemein, whoever go post somewhere else, please.

One of the problems is the community QA queue that has been stuck for ages (oldest packages are about a year old). I quickly went through the list yesterday and the situation seems to be (please correct me if I'm wrong) caused by multiple factors: 1) lack of testers 2) lack of automated promotion system 3) communication problems. The combination of the problems makes the community QA pretty much a waste of time.

Personally I'd start with something we can do without paid help as in go though the packages that can be promoted (do what the community QA is supposed to do) all clean the queue. After this it gets a bit more difficult without help from people maintaining the infra. But if we provide them a list of actions needed for each of the packages stuck in the queue instead of demanding root access this thing just might get solved. In any case the problem won't go away just be talking.

As a long term solution I'd like to see a fremantle target in OBS (apps.formeego.org). This would solve most of the problems (except the lack of testers). But this is also something that needs help from the maintainers. On the other hand this might turn out to be a waste of time since many of the fremantle packages are orphaned and would require work to move stuff into OBS. In the end of the day it comes down to how many peolpe are left that are willing to do work for fremantle stuff. This might phase out just like the older maemo devices did with only a couple of people interested in them. If that's the case it's not worth the effort.

One solution is simply to trash the community QA process by letting extas rot in peace and only use extras-devel and -testing where testing would the "stable" repo. this is the way out if it's not possible to get the automated promotion system, etc. working. This would be the solution requiring least work and pretty much already is the current practice.

As I said in the mainling list I'm volunteering myself to be one of the people who goes through the QA queue. I'd like to see at least a two more people doing the same. These decisions can't be made by a single person and it doesn't make sense to much before we get people to commit to put some effort into some solution. Also it would help in making the call to get an answer to what people maintainging the infra are planning/allowed to do.

So what do you say? Do we try to resurrect the community QA process, trash it or do something else?

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

An "on-device" client for voting and commenting, still subject to having a garage account, could probably help the QA process.
I've hardly ever voted for a community project in devel (shame on me), if only because I don't know which programs on my device are in devel and wich are already in extra.
This client could be shipped with CSSU for example, to have a broad and yet selected range of users.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

The problem with blocked packages was discussed in this thread.

There was also further discussion in the testing squad mailing list.

We asked to Nemein to arrange any kind of meeting to try to address the problems and discuss our proposals and see how could them be feasible. You can see that in the mailing list thread.

No answer was received. No I have asked to Quim twice to see if he can help us to approach the administrators in order to fix the issues.

There is no more need for discussion on this topic. The testers team and the Council only need a contact point to start addressing the problem.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Yep. we can continue there. I started this thread to collect the different issues around here to give them more visibility.

With 4 people taking part in the discussion that supports my theory of general lack of interests and unwillingness to do something. Anyway, the outcome seems to be that "nemein needs to fix this". True that would be one option but seems like there might be a need to consider other possibilities.

That's the communication problem I mentioned. Hopefully we'll get some clarification to this through Quim if Nemein isn't talking. I'm mostly interested in if someone is paid to improve things around here or just to keep the current things running. In any case I'd expect to get a straight answers about the level of support the infra gets since as pointed out the community cannot do everyting without help. If there's no support to resolving this then the whole QA needs to be binned.

I disagree since the previous discussion didn't lead to a solution and the problems stayed as they are.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

There is an IRC chat meeting about community OBS on April 10 where any interested party should speak up. If we want to pursue fremantle as a target on OBS, then we need to decide that soon, and how we obtain that goal.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Good. Do you have the time of the meeting at hand? I need to add it to my calendar so I won't forget.. :)

Seems that some work has already gone for fremantle obs setup. http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=52804 dunno if that was just a transition plan to meego and abandoned by now..

I'll poke lbt about it.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

The lack of testers is the ultimate problem to solve. I guess it doesn't help that you need to go to the website to do QA. Achipa had created a client for doing QA on device though. Nobody really followed up on this.

Cleanup can be done by the supertesters now already. If you have 2 thumbs down by supertesters, the package is removed.

Same thing for promoting. A QA triage meeting like done in the past would already make a lot of difference there.

I once created a PR1.2 fremantle target on OBS, just to see how many apps compiled. There were some issues, but it could be done if some people want to invest time in this. I can load the packages up in a project in OBS and give someone maintainer rights in that OBS project so you can play with the project config settings.

Most work would be identifying build issues, adding dependencies to the project config. There will be some scratchbox-isms that will pop up, but if someone wants to put some time in it, it can be done.

The apps.formeego.org client now has built in QA. This client could be backported to fremantle too, I guess.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

As timoph kinda says, can you point to the meeting announcement so a) we can attend and b) I can publicise it?

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Do the change include automatic promotion to Extras when quarantine and votes are fulfiled? Most of the packages are ready to be promoted but now they don't have a maintainer anymore to do it manually.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Thanks for sharing.

I agree that tester meeting would help a lot in getting stuff QA'd. From my point of view it's just a matter of setting a day & time for it and I'm in (we can discuss that in a different thread).

So if I understood correctly packages with at least 2 up votes from supertesters should get automatically promoted? Or do they just get unlocked for developer to promote? If promoted - there seems to be a bug ( http://maemo.org/packages/package_in...1.2-15-maemo2/ ). If it's not - how difficult it would be to make it do so? IMO that should help a lot with packages getting stuck in the QA queue.