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

[From: Murray Cumming]

On Tue, 2008-09-02 at 17:16 +0200, Andre Klapper wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 02.09.2008, 16:41 +0300 schrieb
> Dirk-Jan.Binnema at nokia.com:
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Dave Neary [mailto:nearyd at gmail.com] On Behalf Of ext Dave Neary 
> > > Dirk-Jan.Binnema at nokia.com wrote:
> > > Would it be possible for the Modest team to exclusively use 
> > > the external bugzilla, given that it's a free software project?
> > 
> > It would be very nice from the community perspective, very much so,
> > and of course it would make open development much easier as well. 
> > 
> > But, internally, the development process is highly regulated, and tools
> > like bugzilla play different roles than they do outside -- trust me
> > on that one. Modest has to satisfy both of its natures, with 
> > the internal one getting the most emphasis, for very pedestrian 
> > reasons...
> > 
> > So, while I agree that it would be nice to have one open bugzilla, 
> > I do not see that happening anytime soon.
> 
> I also do not see this happening very soon, but it is definitely a
> long-term target of mine.
> Developers want one central place to track software issues.
> This currently is Nokia's internal bug tracker, this should become
> bugs.maemo.org for Maemo open source projects.

I'm not confident that this will happen even for open source parts
because the work on open source parts is often secret. Nokia are just
too afraid of leaking future product features and schedules. But maybe
you can persuade them to do this for _some_ modules, such as GTK+, if
not for others, such as hildon-libs.

I don't speak for Nokia, of course.

But that shouldn't be a blocker to getting some human-readable text for
release notes or NEWS files (ChangeLogs are something else,
traditionally). Once a release is published, I don't see how Nokia could
object to publishing the changes. Hopefully Andre can be the guy to
extract the bug titles for those internal bug numbers. It might would
need advance planning.

> The task is to work out those issues that currently block managing
> Modest, MicroB, etc. completely in public and find solutions for each
> issue, most probably quite often with the input of lawyers, sigh...
> So adopting/using Nokia's current internal processes and workflows in
> public (bugs.maemo.org) requires having a policy about those pieces of
> information that a commercial company does not want to be accessed by
> its competitors, such as policy plans, product and hardware information,
> information about the internal testing infrastructure or especially
> copyright related issues.
> 
> (Half of this email copied from a blog entry I was just writing on.)
> 
> andre
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