[maemo-developers] Extras-testing improvements

[From: Attila Csipa]

On Tuesday 09 March 2010 14:26:51 Dave Neary wrote:
> If the burden on the testers & developers continues to grow, we will see
> a return to distribution in the wild, and away from Extras, which would
> be a disaster for Maemo. Bringing all the 3rd party repositories
> together and making Extras the natural place to ship software to Maemo
> users has been one of the great achievements of the past few years, but
> the social tide is turning against it. Don't make distributing software
> through Extras a task that developers dread.

I would like to have these two things NOT seen as opposing things. Let's 
rephrase the issue as 'how can we maximize the safety of users and quality of 
apps without being a pain'. For example, would the bugtracker issue ever be a 
stumbling point if we had an automated check or option to (semi)automatically 
create/update a bugtracker from the package interface ? I hope you see what 
I'm getting at, it's not the extra requirements that cause the pain, but the 
hoops that they might create. If we do away with the hoops, what remains is a 
general better experience. What is IMHO often the error (in the particular 
case of extras-testing) is that the requirement is introduced without any 
automatism or infrastructure support and then it, while enforceable, creates 
a massive workload and sometimes bad blood. We can and should be able to 
achieve the same goals without either.

Regards,
Attila