[maemo-developers] Beware 'Personal launcher'

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Friday 21 November 2008 08:30:19 Eero Tamminen wrote:
> > I talked to the author. He used your mem-testing scripts and valgrind and
> > couldn't reproduce it either. Nor did he receive any complains from the
> > about 11000 downloads he had.
>
> Now that I was demonstrated the issue[1], I have to admit that the
> applet configuration was pretty unusual and it's unlikely that people
> would leave the applet enabled configured like that.

This is exactly why I do not think that any attempts on quality control of 
Extras are feasible (or even desirable).  I am sure everything in Extras has 
some bugs -- but some have more (or more serious) bugs than others.

The answer is not testing of things being put into Extras: that would take a 
lot of resources, is not scalable and will give rise to false positives and 
negatives (the tester is the one person in 11,000 who hits a bug and refuses 
entry, or the tester does not hit the bug and gives a false sense of 
security).  Of course, if Nokia decided it was worth assigning some QA 
resource and having a repository of software tested to Nokia quality levels 
that would be fine.  But it would be separate from the community repository.

The answer for the community repository is a feedback mechanism, both for 
packages themselves, and for contributors.  We need to create an easy way for 
people to provide feedback on the apps they install from Extras and for 
people to see the feedback level of both the app and the contributor before 
they install it.  It wouldn't be perfect (there may be a really nasty bug 
that only affects 10% of people) but it would be much better than what we 
have today and much better than attempting to impose a quality gate 

Graham