[maemo-developers] 3.2007.10-7 - Detailed change log?

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

(as always, my own opinions, not Nokia's)

ext Andy Mulhearn wrote:
> Hmmm, I think someone's missing the point here. You "Nokia" tell me as
> an end user nothing about what's in each release. From start to finish,
> there's no information in a release that tells me what it includes. At
> the very minimum I want the delta between the current and previous
> releases.

This is not really an area where I can have an effect except by making
sure my own packages changelogs are OK(ish), but I'm genuinely
interested about things improving.


Please be a bit more specific about what things need to improve,
and how they should be improved, answering "Everything!" to a question
of "what's wrong" doesn't really say anything (any developer should know
that).  If you have examples, the better.

As a start, I Googled a bit what the other distributions have as their
release notes (I did this pretty quickly so I'm sure I've missed/misread
some information that is available):

Maemo:
 http://maemo.org/news/view/1183705330.html
 http://maemo.org/news/view/1183706440.html
 http://repository.maemo.org/stable/3.2/content_comparison.html
 http://maemo.org/news/view/1186118712.html

List of the new features in ITOS, more details about SDK, list of
packages and their versions, installation instructions.  How to get
source packages (with their changelogs) for the Open Source/Sourced
components.

In the latest ITOS release there really weren't that much changes
besides the listed new features, mostly it's just support for the new
features listed in the announcement.


RedHat:
 http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f7/en_US/
 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats/PackageChanges/UpdatedPackages

Quite nice, has installation/upgrade notes, requirements, some
screenshots, notes about changes in (some) packages usage.


Suse:
 http://www.suse.com/relnotes/i386/openSUSE/10.2/RELEASE-NOTES.en.html
 http://www.novell.com/documentation/sled10/readme/RELEASE-NOTES.en.html
 http://www.novell.com/products/desktop9/
 http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/desktop/index_all.html

About the same information.


Ubuntu:
 http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/releasenotes/606
 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyReleaseNotes

Even less information.


Debian:
 Good per package upgrade information.  No screenshots.


Windows (Vista):
 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/default.mspx
 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/default.aspx

Very extensive (but then, with Office, Windows is the main MS product
and it does releases a bit less often).


Some observations:

* For all of these Linux distros the package change list seems to be
  provided only by distrowatch (community), for example:
    http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fedora

* None of these list bugs fixed in the release.


Comments on Maemo:

* As noted earlier, public vs. internal Bugzilla handling could be
  improved.  It should be possible to query what public bugs are fixed
  between public releases and get a good answer (especially as Maemo
  package source package changelogs list internal bug numbers)

* _No_ other distro is providing bugfix list for releases, so I don't
  see why it's so huge deal Maemo not providing one either.  For open
  source components the fixes can be seen from the changelogs.  For
  closed components, if the possible bugs haven't bothered anybody
  enough to file bug reports (so that status could be seen from a
  public Bugzilla), clearly they are not an issue...
  - Note: security bugs in closed components could be a different
    issue, but the closed components handling data from the network
    are mostly things that Nokia doesn't control (Flashplayer,
    Opera, multimedia codecs).  I think you need to bug upstream
    provider about them also.

* For many of the Linux distros, www-sites not associated with
  the project can also contain articles which "Tour" the new release
  and provide screenshots, so this could be provided by the community,
  if Nokia is not doing it

* There could be a list of all packages and table of their versions also
  for ITOS releases, not just the SDK ones (which lacks proprietary
  packages from ITOS, but has additional devel packages) I guess, but
  that doesnt' add that much


> If that's fixed defect this in package that and upgraded Opera
> to version y then that's fine. But you seem incapable of doing even that.

Are you talking about:
- Bugs in the upstream Opera
- Bugs in Maemo specific Opera changes (if any), hopefully filed
  to Maemo bugzilla
?

For former you would anyway need go to upstream bug tracking system,
I don't think we internally track all the bugs in upstream components,
at least there's nobody duplicating upstream bugs to our internal
bugzilla.


If the proprietary components would be available also as separate binary
packages, and (most of) those would have (reasonable) changelogs, would
that seem a reasonable aim?  The packages version list table could maybe
then  have links to the Debian sources/diffs of these package which
contain the co changelog.


> And the new browser is not part of the released image so I'm not
> interested. But will be when it is.
>
> To be honest, your response is more along the same line of the previous
> responses, i.e. "it's more complex than you understand" which again just
> tells me Nokia either can't or won't provide this information.

Well, I was trying to explain why some things are currently as they are,
but obviously I started from the wrong end and should have first
tried more to get out a bit more specific answers what's wrong
(compared to what others are providing) and what should be prioritized.


> No, I can't help thinking that it's you that's trying to obfuscate
> things.

Well, the discussion *has* been a bit confusing, everybody was (I think)
talking about different things, Quim listed them in the other mail...


	- Eero

PS. This discussion feels a bit like we were demanded to build a car and
people keep repeating that they want a _whole_ car, and we know that we
cannot build a truck, but still don't know whether people want a van,
amfibi, convertible, a toy car, does it need to work with electricity,
gas or what... :-)