Hi, back from holidays. mmm where to start
On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 20:23 +0100, ext Andy Mulhearn wrote: > You "Nokia" tell me > as an end user nothing about what's in each release. From start to > finish, there's no information in a release that tells me what it > includes. Let's see what Nokia has told end users about the last release: (((moved to the end of the message since Jakub posted most if it while I was writing this email))) I would say the majority of end users and application developers can live happily with this. All this is much more than we had in previous releases: compare to the IT OS 2007 / maemo 3.0 release 6 months before and you will see the progress done. Is this not enough? Agreed, this is why more work is being done. In order to get into details let's de-mix some aspects that are quite mixed in this discussion - helping nobody: NEW FEATURES vs FIXED BUGS Features and bugs go through totally different channels in our development process. Offering more level of detail about new features is doable. We made a first step for the latest update, and for Chinook we plan to have a level of detail that will hopefully make happy power users (and developers when we talk about development related tools). About fixed bugs reported in the public bugzilla, we know we owe to the users and developers reporting those bugs a better response. The progress done in the last 6 months is remarkable but we are still not there. We tried but we couldn't have an updated report in the last release. We are still working in our processes. Being conservative I expect the Chinook release to have a partial collection of fixed bugs and get into good quality standards by Diablo. END USER ORIENTED vs DEVELOPER ORIENTED Nokia develops products mainly for mainstream consumers and maemo offers a platform mainly to application developers. I think the level of detail provided in the last release to these two groups is quite decent. One exception would be the users that have submitted bugs, as mentioned before. Another exception would be the platform developers, that just recently we have confirmed that we want to serve as well. If you disagree with the previous paragraph please file bugs and requests for enhancement, being as specific as possible. I'm the direct responsible of this area and this is one of my priorities (again) for the current release under development. INTERNAL vs EXTERNAL Nowadays a Nokia developed piece of code goes through a full internal process before being published in a new release. Testing and bugfixing are part of this process, generating lots of bugs that are fixed before the code is made public. Nokia won't publish information about bugs fixed before the new code is released. Things change as soon as the code is published. Known bugs should be shared and updates on publicly submitted bugs should be updated. In fact those bugs already solved in internal releases should be already updated, and some of this is already happening now. A field of progress has been the release of software under development, allowing the community to file bugs before an official release. We will do more of this and we can do more if all of us conclude that is worth going for a public maemo distribution, where our integration process would be public. DISTRIBUTION vs PACKAGES Even if we agree that we need t provide more details on new features and fixed bugs, things like a detailed change log and a full list of bugs fixed belong more to the package / application level than to the release of a whole distribution / operating system. An IT OS consists of hundreds of packages and we can't expect each one of them offering the same level of detail than i.e. a new Inkscape release. We are happy comparing maemo release notes with the release notes of other distributions or operating systems. And then we can also compare releases of applications with an end user impact, platform components and so on. Comparing apples with apples and oranges with oranges we will be able to find easier a satisfactory solution. For instance at a package level all the open sources include a changelog. If you find the level of detail isn't enough please file a bug against that package. OPEN SOURCE vs PROPRIETARY Open source software and non-free software usually deal differently with the details provided in updates and new developments. We need to agree in the appropriate feedback and level of detail that is desirable, useful and possible for each case. We are happy agreeing on documented levels of details to be satisfied. NOKIA DEVELOPED vs THIRD PARTY We are responsible of all the software released in the IT OS, but we are "more" responsible of the software we develop. We are happy agreeing on the information to be provided in the new releases of the packages developed by Nokia. We are more likely to remit responsibilities to upstream projects, partners or other 3rd party combination when it comes to discuss their own packages. Having clear all the above my feeling is that we are not that far from a) agreeing on feasible and satisfactory solutions for each case and b) implementing these solutions in 1-2 releases. At least I hope this email will help all of us moving forward from the YouDontMakeAnyProgress vs YouDonUnderstandTheComplexity tennis game. PS: the 'what Nokia has told end users' excerpt I had written before Jakub's post: - "What's new" popup in the N800 pages at nokia.com: http://europe.nokia.com/A4307030 - Extended version in Tableteer and maemo.org: Feature upgrade release to the Internet Tablet OS 2007 edition http://maemo.org/news/view/1183705330.html We also have told this to developers: - maemo 3.2 Bora released with minor updates http://maemo.org/news/view/1183706440.html - full release notes http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/3.2/maemo-sdk-relnotes_3.2.txt - content comparisson http://repository.maemo.org/stable/3.2/content_comparison.html And last week: Internet Tablet OS source packages available in the repository http://maemo.org/news/view/1186118712.html The sources: http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo3.2/free/source/ -- Quim Gil - http://maemo.org _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
