[maemo-developers] On the problem of Nokia bugs substituting changelogs

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Ryan Abel wrote:
> itT user free was kind enough to compile what basically amounts to a
> changelog for 4.2008.30-2[1] (something Nokia has been promising to
> do for 2 years now with zero results).

I remember the discussion, but I think the promise was more about it
being possible to be able to get a changelog of the changes relevant
to the community by linking the public bugzilla (alias field) contents
to the internal bug numbers in the packages changelog.


> What I've noticed about these
> changelogs is that many of them mention Nokia bug numbers in lieu of
> actually providing real information on changes. Though typical of
> Nokia, this is _NOT_ acceptable. This practice limits deciphering of
> these changelogs to people who have access to Nokia's internal
> tracker. While this is great for Nokia employees and contractors, this
> is not an OK thing to hoist upon the community.

While this would be nice (and is up to each specific project), I'm not
sure how much of a problem it really is when the public bug / internal
bug linking works.  Most of the internal bugs aren't really relevant
to the users as they are issues that haven't been in any of the public
releases (most are for internal changes (feature development) and all
significant bugs that have been found internally are naturally fixed
before public release).

As to linking internal and external bugs, I think more interesting
would be how many of the public bugs (which aren't enhancements
or unconfirmed) don't have a corresponding internal bug alias...



	- Eero