Notices

I am no developer, and I have read the warnings, but I am finding more and more that if I want to make the most of my n900 I really do need extras-devel enabled.

And I don’t think I’m unique here! I don’t think it makes a lot of sense for power users, happy to use beta quality software, to need to enable “devel”. That’s what “testing” is for!

So I’m asking the question, is it too hard to get software out of devel and into testing? Are the requirements to strict? Or are developers too conservative?

Because in my experience, most of the apps in devel work just fine. And a lot of them stay there for far too long

it's just hard to get the ten votes required sometimes and i think it's quarantined in there for 2 weeks or something too. And then you have to go back and click some button to "promote it". So half the time the developer doesn't care anymore after that. I guess if you update your app it goes back into devel again? So, yeah, we pretty much all use devel and testing. It's just an extra layer of protection for idiots and so we can say "you were warned" if you actually manage to break something.

For almost half a year, I never bothered to promote qgvdial to testing because I didn't know if enough people were using it - no one complained about bugs... no one said a good word about it either.
It was almost a feeling of indifference - if no one is using it, why bother?
The reason I finally moved it to testing is because of the website that shows the number of downloads of any app from the extras repositories.
When I saw that there were about 2000 downloads for every day that I updated it on devel, I realized that there were users, and maybe I ought to move to the next level.

On the other hand, I'm back to feeling the indifference: More than 100 downloads from testing on the day I promote it... but zero votes on the testing page.

Pretty soon I'm likely to stop promoting.

yeah it's just a pain, like 1/100 users actually will go to that page.
check this app out, it's a great solution: KISStester
Well, it's a partial solution anyways. It actually doesn't load for me, but I think it will be fixed quickly. I would just install it so you don't forget to try it again soon.

Yes I use that. Ironically enough, it is in extras-devel. Talk about chick-and-egg...

you don't vote for devel apps, the maintainer chooses when he feels its ready to go to testing, its in testing that the voting begins, apps in devel only have to have like ten downloads and ten days quarantine i think.

sometimes the maintainer isn't happy for his app to be tested yet, sometimes it isn't optified, sometimes its just left like uvatbc mentioned.

i have been meaning to take part in testing myself, but the amount of apps i use normally don't really cross with the ones requiring testing, and i haven't found the time to create an account specifically for working through the testing list backlog (you should have a look at the list, if no-one's linked to it by the time i get back from work i'll try to find it)

Another problem I see is that many users like me first encounter the app when it is in extra-devel. Then I start using it, I participate in thread opened by the auhtor here, I update the version when new one pops during daily update, but actually I never realize when the app is gone to extras-testing. When I see in the thread author asking for votes to promote the app further, that's when I go to vote. May be it is me who is wrong, but I am not used to check in which repo the app is currently located.

It's really slow to get ten (plus) votes, at least if your application isn't popular. Our application has been in extras-testing for five months and only got four votes so far.

Developers: Stick links to the page where you vote in your app threads, and in your signatures. Really, it has repeatedly been stated by the users here that if they knew where to go they would vote. Right now there is not convenient link anywhere easily reachable from talk or the main site, or the app download part of this site, to the voting pages / testing queue.

On another note, I personally have been a lot more active in so far as voting goes lately than I was when I first got my N900 - I just don't install that much stuff, and what I have installed is often already promoted, or I've voted on it, and then no one else has for a while, and then another version gets pushed to testing, my vote is lost, and I'd be happy to vote again except I just don't know when a new version is pushed in.

At the risk of sounding stupid/part of the problem, I have never "voted" and i wouldn't even know how.

Can somebody clarify the whole karma/voting system? Do you need it to get into extras-testing or just into extras?