[maemo-community] email address as bugtracker link for non-small projects?

[From: Uwe Kaminski]

Am Mittwoch, den 25.08.2010, 18:29 +0100 schrieb Andrew Flegg:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 18:06, Uwe Kaminski <jukey at ju-key.de> wrote:
> > As written a few weeks ago at the testingsquad mailing list:
> > https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/testingsquad-list/2010-August/000116.html
> 
> However the Testing Squad is a group for applying the policy, not
> making it. The correct place for the discussion is here.

Thanks for the hint. I did not know that. A lot of discussions regarding
the policy are done at the testingsquad mailing list [1]. There are also
some of the rules discussed in the wiki [2]. In addition to that I was
unable to find a clear definition what the testingsquad list is for. I
suggest to define it better here:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_mailing_lists

> >> Beside all technical reasons which make a reporting solution failing...
> >> I never would force developers to do something or not.
> 
> Except you are?

As explained I would do this differentiation for extras-(testing) only.

> >> Even if the choice of their preferred way to send bugs is something
> >> good for themselves (often) but bad for reporters (email).
> 
> There's no evidence that email is bad for *reporters*. In fact, it's
> easier: there's no need to check for duplicates. You fire off an email
> which says what the steps to reproduce are, what you expected to
> happen, what happened and how reproducible it is; along with
> environmental information.

But maybe 10 or 100 people fire off an email. At some point more effort
is spent into frustrating reports by many people than in developing the
software. That's not bad for this application or package itself but
that's bad for the community which looses people willing to test and
willing to provide well made bug reports. 

> However, users using the Extras repository (which is, as you say,
> enabled out-of-the-box) are exposed to it through HAM: this makes no
> exposure of the bug tracker field. Only if a user goes to
> maemo.org/downloads/ will they see the "Report a bug against this
> application".
> 
> At that point, it reflects badly on the developer if they never
> respond to a bug report.

Maybe. But at least people can see if it's worth the effort to spend
time in reporting bugs or suggest enhancements. It may be easy to fire a
bug mail but it takes a lot of time to reproduce errors, to get log
files or debug stuff and to enter a report in a foreign language. If you
do this in more than one application it's easy to calculate that it
costs time. Time which could be saved if a tracker is available. Time to
get the testing queue "clean".

> The QA criteria are NOT designed to make every single package on
> maemo.org excellent.

That's reasonable. But the process itself contains a _qa process_ which
is one of the _requirements_ to bring a package into extras. If there
already is a qa-process the way to handle this process should be fair.
And this means better bug reporting possibilities as more complex an
application gets.

> > I'm able to understand that people don't have time but that's
> > why I also would like to see that developers understand that _I_
> > don't have unlimited time too.
> 
> Then don't spend ages reporting bugs in applications which have only
> email-based mechanisms. Or send a quick mail first and ask if the
> developer needs more info.

That is what I will do. But why not prevent packages with email from
hitting the test queue? Other testers should spend ages?


> > As solution for this problem I would love to see a whitelist of projects
> > which allow email adresses:
> 
> I am strongly against this, for the reasons outlined above. We
> shouldn't be putting up *unnecessary* barriers to someone getting
> their application into Extras, and this *is* one of those, IMHO.

As far as I see this discussion is a debate "bring fast and much
application packages into testing" vs. "encourage people to spend time
with testing software and give feedback before they hit extras".

Thanks, Andrew, for your opinion. It's sometimes hard to see problems
from an other perspective but even in this case there is no good or bad,
no email allowed or not allowed. IMHO it should be a compromise. Maybe
there are other possibilities to solve this problem?

More voices are welcome! :)

Best regards Uwe 

[1] Examples for discussions in the testingsquad-list:
https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/testingsquad-list/2010-July/000089.html 
https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/testingsquad-list/2010-August/000128.html 
https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/testingsquad-list/2010-April/000080.html 
https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/testingsquad-list/2010-March/000041.html 

[2] http://wiki.maemo.org/Talk:Bugtracker

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