[maemo-developers] maemo-developers Digest, Vol 59, Issue 25

[From: Urho Konttori]

My 2 cents is that I find it also imbearably

>  - on one hand makes it easier for developers to get their updated
> versions into the feeds, while
>
>  - on the other hand make as as sure as (practibly) possible that users
> (which one day will mostly not be developers) do not brick their devices
> or other awkward problems that could lead them to complain quite
> cluelessly and loudly at Nokia or here on the mailinglists?
>
> Either way it hurts.
>
> So we have to find a way to reduce the pain for all of us - the
> developers, as Benoit is, and users.
>
> Maybe it could help to do a small survey about such processes for other
> distributions and products?
>

Maemo.org is not a distribution. If it was, then developers would not have
to even care about packaging, as the distro would take care of that, as well
as for the QA.

Also, the current model of centralized gigantic repository does not scale up
too well. Just look at the state of using extras-devel is on the current
devices (hint: slow pain). I think there is something also badly wrong in
HAM in the way of creating the data model (commits welcome), but still, the
issue is the same: for a random user, there is not enough information on the
ham listings to decide between several applications that provide similar
functionality. However, this is available in much more rich form on the
maemo.org downloads section.

It makes much more sense imho to contain the Q&A in the maemo.org downloads
section (have the comments, and error messages to be also linked to
versions. And keep libraries in the central repo, while having an easy
support for projects to setup their own repo or just to provide a deb.

How I see the current status quo is that we are paranoid of ourselves. We
don't trust each other enough to say that if you are a good developer (like
x-fade is probably in everybodys opinion), we still demand each release that
he makes to be evaluated for entry to extras. It simply makes no sense to
me. I would understand it for ovi store content, but even there, the checks
are simple: there is a list of issues that must be done, then the package is
submitted to ovi store qa, where they test the app, check that it's optified
and run a bit of tracing of the bg activities, networks use and so forth and
then say that, ok, go ahead or that didn't pass because of this. I feel that
currently our maemo.org testing is more paranoid, with demanding bugzilla
(totally unnecessary for most of the content), nitpicking about the apps
behavior (I have seen multiple thumbs down's because some tester didn't like
some small feature of the app).

I would not, as a community developer, put up with it. I would put up with
what ovi store has in their testing model, as it is a) clear, b) there is a
business reason for it for Nokia and c) I would expect to profit when the
app goes to store. But for community apps, we just absolutely must relax the
conditions.

I would propose the following as the first step to improve the support for
the community developers:
if a component X has been successfully promoted to extras once, when there
is an update from the same developer for this component, it will gain the
access to enter extras automatically (so, developer still needs to press the
magic button). This is to make it somewhat sane to do updates of the apps as
well as to have testing concentrate on the new content and not have to test
ukeyboard kb layouts for the 10th time in the month because some key had
been moved to different position in arabic vkb (I like far fetched examples,
a build fault in me).

2nd suggestion:
Start promoting the downloads section more

In my opinion as a community developer, I really don't have the time to even
follow the testing process even once for a component that I would try to
push to extras, let alone do it for every fix. This is just insane.

All security comments are insane in my opinion. If some person really wants
to be evil, there is nothing in our process that would block that except by
accident.

Ok, my 2 cents for a message that I probably should not have sent. I just
really felt the pain in reading x-fades comment. I really do thing we have
started to make our home our prison. I shrudder to even think what kind of
winds security framework will blow our way.

Yeah, this is with my community hat on  -  definitely not an official nokia
comment.
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