[maemo-developers] How to use extras-testing correctly?

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Sep 24, 2009, at 15:13, Marius Vollmer wrote:

> 2009/9/24 Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah at jeremiahfoster.com>:
>>
>> All community developed projects have a Quality Assurance process.  
>> Debian's,
>> which is what Maemo is based on, looks like this;
>>
>> 1. Submit your app to autobuilders
>> 2. If it fails to build from source, start over at 1
>> 3. If it builds, it stays in the new queue for ten days
>> 4. After ten days it automatically gets promoted to 'testing'
>> 5. After (roughly) eighteen months, testing is frozen (no more new  
>> apps)
>> 6. After all Release Critical bugs are fixed, testing becomes stable
>
> I think it is important to mention that Debian is much more careful  
> when
> giving upload rights to people.  It takes quite some dedication and  
> time
> (months) to even get to step 1 for the first time.

This is an important point - to upload to debian you need to be a  
Debian Developer, and that can easily take _years_. Maemo is open to  
anyone.
>
> Also, packages don't get promoted from the NEW queue to testing, they
> get promoted from unstable.  The very first upload of a package has to
> pass the NEW queue before it goes to unstable.  Subsequent uploads of
> the package go directly to unstable.  (This is just a detail.)

Actually, until unstable is 'frozen' into testing, they are the same  
thing.
>
> Also also, there are many more details to promotion than just waiting
> ten days, of course.  The salient point is that promotion happens by
> default unless it is stopped because of bugs, instead of being stopped
> by default unless there is enough karma to allow it.  (This is not  
> just
> a detail.)

This is something that we may want to think about - automatic  
promotion. I think stopping an app based on negative karma or test  
failures is fair, but having a criteria for promotion might mean good  
apps don't make it to users. This seems a little unfair.
>
>> Maemo is trying to innovate and crowd source the quality control and
>> shrink that time as much as possible.
>
> The big fundamental difference between Debian and Maemo Extras is that
> Debian is producing one big release of a complete integrated
> distribution, while Maemo Extras is a collection of mostly independent
> applications that are released independently.  Maemo Extras is not
> collectively frozen at any point.  (It will cool down as people lose
> interest in it, but nobody is waiting for a stable release of Maemo
> Extras as a whole.)

Well, I see them both as operating systems, so I don't think they are  
really that different in keeping quality across the OS. The big  
difference between debian and Maemo is that debian is _completely_  
free software while Maemo has closed bits.
>
> Maemo as a whole (including the platform produced by Nokia,  
> applications
> that are part of Nokia's releases such as Email and Sketch, and
> independently developed add-ons such as Maemo Extras) should innovate
> beyond Debian by defining a release process that allows multiple,
> largely independent 'modules' in the distribution that are released
> independently.

This is what Niels is trying to architect with our feedback.
>
> PS: "crowd source"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsource

Jeremiah