[maemo-developers] Package promoting

[From: Polyvertex]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 22:51, Attila Csipa <maemo at csipa.in.rs> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Polyvertex <polyvertex at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If I am a lambda user, I just want to get applications on my phone and
>> don't want to spent time for downloading an another application B to
>> note or vote for application A.
>
> I personally have no problem with that. I actually even support that - you
> don't want to test, you don't want to get karma, just plain Apps - cool !
> That's still better than mobbing people into voting for apps.

And technically speaking, how do you 'support' casualness exactly ?
Please don't turn this into a flamebait, this is not my intention...

>
>>
>> If I feel unhappy with the latest application I've downloaded, I just
>> want a simple/unique place to say it to the maintainers and eventually
>> have a voting system to vote for/against a (group of) developer(s)
>> according to the quality of its/their releases, that would make sense
>> here.
>
> You have that, but given the way HAM works, lambda users will have
> difficulties finding it and what you get is a talk thread with a 'Maemo
> sucks' title.

It seems everyone here is happy with the idea of creating an
extra-application to vote for/against an another application. Even if,
of course, I do appreciate the effort (your effort in this case) to
improve the community living, I still consider to be a non-sense the
idea of needing an application to do voting only because the
server-side partially failed to do the job. I mean, I can understand
it is maybe better for the user to be able to immediately indicate a
mood about a given application but don't you think the initial problem
is that users still don't know where to report issues ? Package page ?
Garage page ? New talk thread ? Find developer's e-mail address ?
Also, don't you think this KISStester thing should be completely
integrated into the application manager so users can see feedbacks
from others *before* installing ? In this case, this would totally
legitimate this new feature.


>
>> If you want such a perfect QA process, why not building a big
>> Ovi/AppStore, hire some testers and application approval team, and
>> stop saying Maemo.org is an open community ?
>
> Hey. That *is* a bit harsh. Ideas are of course always welcome. But just as
> I feel we don't have the right to do the above, I also feel we don't have
> the right to shove down updates/apps down the throats of unsuspecting users
> who are not interested in half-baked software. I mean, Extras-devel IS
> public and advertised - anybody interested in bleeding edge software can get
> it there, and that's OK. OTOH There ARE N900 owners who really don't want to
> reflash every other week and think hunting down processes and
> broken/oversized packages is not fun - and that's who Extras is for. So
> there, to each to his own.

Yes I totally agree with you but you missed my point.
My initial point is about stuck releases into extras-testing, not
about pushing an alpha version from extras-devel directly into extras.
I consider this extras-testing step to be too constraining for the
developers and the users : if a user wants bleeding edge versions, he
will use this advertised 'extras-devel'  repository, otherwise, the
'extras' one should be good enough for him.
Regarding the 'reflash' problem due to a very bad application, this is
where a good enough feedback system should be so the number of
impacted users should be quickly limited. Again, users don't know
where to report.


>
>> I would prefer the Maemo.org community to act like a regular open
>> community and let people vote for/against an application *after* it
>> has been released. Thus, only 2 repositories should be enough :
>> 'extras' and 'extras-beta'.
>
> I must be missing something - that has nothing to do with community
> openness, and in fact I'm inclined to say there isn't a single distro that
> works that way. Imagine Debian said 'ok, everything the devs want to promote
> gets promoted to stable, and if there are complaints, we'll remove it from
> the repo'. We kind of had that with Chinook/Diablo. It didn't work, really.
> We had a lot (LOT) more complaints about borked installs.

I cannot discuss about Chinook and Diablo distros since I never used
them but that is my point, maybe it didn't work because there was no
integrated feedback system into the application manager (or its
equivalent) ?

You are comparing Debian releasing *cycle* with the Maemo.org's
package promoting process. You should not for obvious reasons and
also, I am happy I don't have to wait 3/4 years to get the next stable
version of gPodder. I don't criticize the releasing cycle of the
Debian stable, in fact, I heavily rely on it everyday but I am happy
that applications on my N900 are released a bit faster (not quite
enough actually).

Generally speaking, I can see goodwill everywhere on Maemo.org. This
community is very strong and this thread tends to demonstrate it, but
I feel like everyone want to "Do The Right Thing" without any
pragmatism. I mean, as a community oriented project, you cannot have
such a perfect QA process, and the way the Debian project is organized
seems indeed to be good for such a thing but Maemo.org does not work
this way at all.
Also, this does not mean it has to become anarchy and
application/virus/bug bombing just because there are 2 repositories
instead of 3.

Well, I'll stop here, my English is not good enough to clearly
elaborate my point of view and I can see that continuing again and
again against the same arguments is a non-sense (i.e.: "we've already
done that, it doesn't work"). Though I'm a bit disappointed, at least
I understood how things work in here and I am even happy to have a
view of things to come.

Cheers,
Jean-Charles