I went to San Francisco (US&A) to play Ping-Pong with Chris (I also recommend him as a tour guide – he knows the city). At the same time a conference took place.

At the weekend’s preconference I discussed MeeGo L10N with Margie. I cleaned up the wiki before, but still there is enough to still sort out:

• no rules for starting a translation team or conflict management
• No deadlines / String freezes / decision processes for break approvals
• For GTK based modules, developers often forget to add an entry to the LINGUAS file when adding .po files
• no instructions for Gtk Internationalization for Developers (the GNOME documentation might be helpful here)
• The GLS prefix in bug summaries is confusing (it stands for “Global Languages Solutions”) – some plans to change this.

The most important talk from my point of view was Carsten‘s “Transparency, inclusion and meritocracy in MeeGo: Theory and practice” showing some of the transparency problems that MeeGo has not only after one of the two bigger companies involved announced a change in direction.

There was also a Release Engineering BoF. A great opportunity as so far I had been totally unsuccessful in understanding how this works in MeeGo. This has not improved yet though. It looks like decisions are made completely in private in the offices of one company (Intel) instead of the public (internet). Other issues: The Submit Request account process is not documented – how to contribute from a new company? You’d expect something other than dead silence here. But it was agreed on that the CCB (Change Control Board) process for MeeGo 1.2 was completely invisible and “crap”. (Dawn might now complain about my use of language, but this was the wording used by those running the session.)

But the original reason to come here was MeeGo’s Error Management (EM) and Quality Assurance (QA). I outlined some EM and QA issues to discuss on the meego-qa mailing list before the conference took place. See the summary of this BoF. Hoping to see further discussions of issues in the public, as agreed upon.
Iekku and I gave a talk on the basics of bug handling. Plus Eric and Stephen presented some cute Bugzilla extensions but I leave it to them to blog and email about it (a good task as they have been too silent and invisible so far).

In case Miguel makes it popular to take the name of a previous company and change the order of the letters a bit to find a name for a new company, this is my proposal for Nokia (as I pass that shop quite often at night when going home and have to smile everytime):

But it happened that it was early October and that I felt like diving into MeeGo bugtriaging. After some public whining, Carsten (who’s always a huge help) and Dawn were kind enough to point out the existence of the meego-qa mailing list. I subscribed.

As some might have noticed, bugs.maemo.org was upgraded from ancient version 2.22 to 3.4 last week. This means we now have a version running that is maintained upstream, a design that fits to the rest of maemo.org, less noisy comments, a frontpage that now states “This is a community issue tracker, sponsored by Nokia, not a Nokia communication channel”, and less complexity by e.g. hiding fields that normal users don’t ever need when filing a report. Plus we are not at the bottom of LPSolit’s list of Bugzilla installations anymore. ;-)

All kudos goes to Karsten Bräckelmann for lots of work (like applying the maemo.org wide theme, turning some image files into pure CSS, and tracking down ugly database transition issues), David King for continuing with finetuning and fixing missing pieces, and Ferenc Szekely for testing and deploying!

Today I finished updating my little Greasemonkey triage helper script for maemo.org Bugzilla so it should be functional again.

I also wrote an initial Greasemonkey triage helper script for meego.com Bugzilla that provides some common one-click stock answers and will display the email addresses of commenters and reporters by default (I like to spot immediately if a commenter has a corporate background).

(On a side note, yes, Mozilla Jetpack extensions are of course the future and to supersede Greasemonkey, like Matěj’s bugzilla-triage-scripts. That’s on the ever-growing to-do list.)

The enthusiasm at this conference was pretty impressive. It was probably the right boost for the MeeGo project at the right time as engineers of involved companies could get to know each other and hopefully now also understand a bit better the needs and expectations of the community with regard to openness. At least some of them. ;-)

(Compared to other conferences) I went to a lot of talks in order to get a better understanding of MeeGo.

After the initial keynotes and Dawn Foster’s “State of the community” talk I went to Eric & Stephen’s “Error management Tools and Processes” talk which helped realizing what we are after in the field of error management.

My second day started with Quim’s Marketing session and Dave Neary’s enjoyable “Community Anti-Patterns” (many of them already well known from Maemo). Didn’t manage to attend Stskeeps’ “MeeGo on N900” talk because of some chats in front of the venue and in the entrance hall. Continued with the insightful “MeeGo L10N/I18N upstream”, “Community Metrics” and “Community Application support”.

The “MeeGo Quality Approach” talk by Veli-Pekka Valula and May Xie was helpful to understand the complexity of QA and why help in improving the bug management is welcome. Also a nice opportunity to meet the Intel QA folks from the mailing list in person!

My own BoF session “Handling bug reports in bugs.meego.com” was on Wednesday morning right after the great Guinness party the evening before. Hence I incorrectly expected not to see many people around (and me being sleepy and tired) but according to feedback it went well and I think we had fun (well, I had!).
When I created my slides I had Josh Berkus’ “How to Prevent Community: Making Sure Your Pond Stays Small” in mind but I kept sticking to issues specific to bug management that could be done better in Maemo and MeeGo. Right now there are mostly bug reports by people with a technical background in the bugtracker but once MeeGo becomes more popular we will have to deal with user reports with different qualities and points of view.
I hope the video will soon be available somewhere here.

All in all I had a good time in Dublin that left me in a positive mood regarding the future of MeeGo.