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qgil's Avatar
Posts: 3,105 | Thanked: 11,088 times | Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)
#35
About PR1.2 Closed Testing, couldn't find any thread discussing this but if there is one please point to it or if you want to discuss further please create on and let's move the discussion there.

Breaking from past tradition, Nokia extended early testing privileges to select maemo.org community members for the PR1.1 update. As far as I’m aware Nokia’s request to limit discussion was honored so it came as a surprise when Nokia reverted and closed PR1.2 to external testing. That wasn’t helped by delays which might well have been mitigated by including additional trusted testers into the process.

I’ll be disappointed if there is no PR1.3 for Maemo 5, and even more so if the community doesn’t get a chance to test it prior to formal release. Come on, Nokia, let us help quality assurance!
The semi-open testing for PR1.1 was an interesting experiment that was found to be less than more useful. And not because of the contributions received (very good ones) but all the context forced by this situation. The root of the problem was again to mix open source expectations with a commercial release made of open and proprietary components.

The real thing comes when you can separate open from closed, public from confidential. See what is being cooked at http://wiki.meego.com/Quality_Assurance_Team + http://wiki.meego.com/MeeGo_Release_Creation which fulfils (and if those guys get it right exceeds) the expectations of those of you running alpha/beta/pre-releases of your favorite piece of open source software.

No corporate confidentiality, no certifications, no legal liabilities, no peer/media pressure to know about something confidential... all this in a context of public release process and calendar defined by weekly unstable releases where fixes can be fast integrated and verified.

The experiment of PR1.1 was interesting but couldn't be repeated and even less scaled without putting Nokia and the testers under counterproductive tension and risks.
 

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