Mel Chua, UTC -5

Bugmastering, round 1

Attempts from May 14, 2008. I've refrained from actually doing anything in Trac this time because I want to see if my comments are on-track here.

I did not thoroughly weed for duplicates, but suspect there might be dupes in tickets involving USB keys, mimetypes, or Activity icons, as well as discussions for simpler implementations/interfaces for Tubes and other collaborative APIs.

Questions

  • Who is doing Sugar development?
  • Sugar is a community project. Many of the developers are contracted by OLPC, many are volunteers. You can get a raw idea of the people involve from the Modules page. A few of us are also trying to setup SugarLabs, a foundation to sustain development. --Marcopg
  • What are the priorities for Sugar development?
  • The 1.0 Roadmap should give you a good idea of what are the medium term priorities. --Marcopg
  • What is the goal for this upcoming milestones?
  • For 0.82, the next Sugar release, we are going to work mainly on OLPC Update.2 priorities. I need to extract the major Sugar features and changes from there and add to the Roadmap. Other than that 0.82 will be mostly bug fixes. --Marcopg
  • What are the big annoyances/obstacles to making the above happen?
  • I don't see big obstacles. Involving the community more and better would certainly get us faster though. --Marcopg
  • Do we have a sense of what makes a good Sugar bug report? (What does?)
  • Some of your notes are actually very good in this respect. What about starting a BugReport page and put your notes there? I can step in and add my ideas. --Marcopg
  • Some assigned bug reports are written in an opaque (to outsiders) shorthand that may make sense for the developer involved, but could forestall anyone else from being able to pop into and contribute towards.
  • This is a very good point actually and I would like to see it our bug reporting guidelines. --Marcopg
  • Do we have a team of verification volunteers? (Should they be recruited?)
  • We don't have one but we should totally recruit it. See my and Walter notes about the verification process on Talk:Triage.
  • Do we want to make it easier to cross-reference bugs with each other by using something like the TracBacks plugin? (Full disclosure: I wrote this.) Also potentially helpful if there will be a separate Sugar Trac: the TrashTalk plugin, which does external trackbacks to tickets (useful for monitoring upstream/downstream trac instances, for instance).
  • We are having a discussion about infrastructure by mail, I'll make sure we include you in the next steps. Give this a few days though, we are still defining SugarLabs infrastructure and it's relation to laptop.org. --Marcopg
  • Do we have a "trac" component on trac (to report something's broken, to request plugins, etc)? Should we?
  • Yup dev.laptop.org has such component. --Marcopg
  • Do we have a good way for newcomers to get set up for testing so they can help verify all the unverified tickets and write better bug reports?
  • Good question. I will send mail about this, added it at the top of my TODO. --Marcopg
  • The way XO icons are clustered around a shared activity in mesh view is represented by code in snowflakelayout.py in sugar. With several participants, the shape is vaguely similar to a snowflake... I'll add a better description in that ticket, in case someone other than Marco works on it...--Morgs 13:56, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Notes

  • A lot of bugs need to be verified. Nearly all of them need to be verified, in fact.
  • Yup, we need to seek help from the community to do this. The developers team is small and overworked. --Marcopg
  • Please please please cross-reference tickets in Trac. When a comment on a ticket refers to "that other ticket where Foobar happened," nobody else knows what "Foobar" was!
  • Good candidate for triage guidelines! --Marcopg
  • I read all the tickets, but the report below doesn't summarize them all; it points out the ones I think may be in need of a spotlighting.

High priority

  • #4100 - School server component needed to provide human readable index of journal backup. This has been on the to-do list for 7 months. There is a spec for this, and implementation is nearly done except for one bit. This was formerly supposed to be done by Ivan, but Martin has taken over. The bug report text should change to make this clearer.
  • Which text do you think should change? I reassigned the ticket to Martin, but if you can think of ways to make that more clear, sure. --Marcopg

Normal priority

  • #2244 - Battery rollover palette inaccurate - This hasn't been touched for 8 months; it appears to have been harder than expected to get battery charge/discharge data. This would be a good thing for someone to pick up in conjunction with making the Power Activity, after verifying that it's still outstanding. #4208 appears to be a duplicate; if so, please close one of these and note that on the other. #5867 should be checked afterwards as it may be potentially related.
  • #4464 requests documentation to be written for mime-type definition for Activities; this is already implemented (see #2453. Also see #6145, which is one result of mime handling done not-quite-right (and a great argument for better documentation so people will do it correctly!) #4001 may also be mime-type related.

Probably fixed, needs verification

If you can, please verify and close these bugs (then mark them as verified on the list, possibly by striking out the text.)

  • #2616 - Shutdown doesn't stop running activities (so if you're in mesh view, they still look like they're active). - This needs to be verified and marked appropriately asap, as the new protocol may have fixed the problem.
  • #2908 - Mesh view fails to connect to access point - this is one particular access point, and the problem appears to be fixed, so if someone can verify the fix and close it, that'd rock.
  • #3087 - Rollover scrubbing leaves "trails" - this may be fixed; it needs verification.
  • #5577 - green not listed as valid color in sugar-control-panel has a simple patch, someone should check if the patch got included and take appropriate action (close the ticket if yes, ask how to get it included if no).

Fun to read

  • #5629 - Add a disable screencorners option in Sugar-control-panel - fun design discussion on the UI for hot corners. Also interesting: #3936, which discusses hotcorners not working in Browse sometimes, and #4429 which discusses the frame-on-hotcorner behavior being slow.