View Single Post
Mutiny32's Avatar
Posts: 71 | Thanked: 6 times | Joined on Jun 2008 @ Lee's Summit, MO, USA
#20
Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
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.