Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

I am no developer, and I have read the warnings, but I am finding more and more that if I want to make the most of my n900 I really do need extras-devel enabled.

And I don’t think I’m unique here! I don’t think it makes a lot of sense for power users, happy to use beta quality software, to need to enable “devel”. That’s what “testing” is for!

So I’m asking the question, is it too hard to get software out of devel and into testing? Are the requirements to strict? Or are developers too conservative?

Because in my experience, most of the apps in devel work just fine. And a lot of them stay there for far too long

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

it's just hard to get the ten votes required sometimes and i think it's quarantined in there for 2 weeks or something too. And then you have to go back and click some button to "promote it". So half the time the developer doesn't care anymore after that. I guess if you update your app it goes back into devel again? So, yeah, we pretty much all use devel and testing. It's just an extra layer of protection for idiots and so we can say "you were warned" if you actually manage to break something.

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

For almost half a year, I never bothered to promote qgvdial to testing because I didn't know if enough people were using it - no one complained about bugs... no one said a good word about it either.
It was almost a feeling of indifference - if no one is using it, why bother?
The reason I finally moved it to testing is because of the website that shows the number of downloads of any app from the extras repositories.
When I saw that there were about 2000 downloads for every day that I updated it on devel, I realized that there were users, and maybe I ought to move to the next level.

On the other hand, I'm back to feeling the indifference: More than 100 downloads from testing on the day I promote it... but zero votes on the testing page.

Pretty soon I'm likely to stop promoting.

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

yeah it's just a pain, like 1/100 users actually will go to that page.
check this app out, it's a great solution: KISStester
Well, it's a partial solution anyways. It actually doesn't load for me, but I think it will be fixed quickly. I would just install it so you don't forget to try it again soon.

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

Yes I use that. Ironically enough, it is in extras-devel. Talk about chick-and-egg...

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

you don't vote for devel apps, the maintainer chooses when he feels its ready to go to testing, its in testing that the voting begins, apps in devel only have to have like ten downloads and ten days quarantine i think.

sometimes the maintainer isn't happy for his app to be tested yet, sometimes it isn't optified, sometimes its just left like uvatbc mentioned.

i have been meaning to take part in testing myself, but the amount of apps i use normally don't really cross with the ones requiring testing, and i haven't found the time to create an account specifically for working through the testing list backlog (you should have a look at the list, if no-one's linked to it by the time i get back from work i'll try to find it)

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

Another problem I see is that many users like me first encounter the app when it is in extra-devel. Then I start using it, I participate in thread opened by the auhtor here, I update the version when new one pops during daily update, but actually I never realize when the app is gone to extras-testing. When I see in the thread author asking for votes to promote the app further, that's when I go to vote. May be it is me who is wrong, but I am not used to check in which repo the app is currently located.

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

It's really slow to get ten (plus) votes, at least if your application isn't popular. Our application has been in extras-testing for five months and only got four votes so far. :)

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

Developers: Stick links to the page where you vote in your app threads, and in your signatures. Really, it has repeatedly been stated by the users here that if they knew where to go they would vote. Right now there is not convenient link anywhere easily reachable from talk or the main site, or the app download part of this site, to the voting pages / testing queue.

On another note, I personally have been a lot more active in so far as voting goes lately than I was when I first got my N900 - I just don't install that much stuff, and what I have installed is often already promoted, or I've voted on it, and then no one else has for a while, and then another version gets pushed to testing, my vote is lost, and I'd be happy to vote again except I just don't know when a new version is pushed in.

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

At the risk of sounding stupid/part of the problem, I have never "voted" and i wouldn't even know how.

Can somebody clarify the whole karma/voting system? Do you need it to get into extras-testing or just into extras?

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

I use http://maemo.org/packages as starting point for all packages.
You see the latest builds and packages from the autobuilder
and a link to extras-testing queue

It isn't that hard to stay up to date for current packages
in extras-testing.

nicolai

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

Too true, I use many of the programs in extra develop, but never knew that I could vote for them. Now I know, I still don't know where to go and how to do it!

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

It's not that hard once you know the links. Now I know. I can remember "maemo.org/packages" - but I didn't know that existed until now. And I've looked. Most users don't think to look or know where to start.

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

The developer promotes from extras-devel to exras-testing when he feels the app is ready, from there it's a question of votes to get from extras-testing to extras and so on.

On the package instance page when a package is in extras-testing is a thumbs up/thumbs down link which you hit to vote, logging in via your separate maemo.org account,

Kind Regards,
D4rK

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

So any good ideas how to make Testing voting more sexy or appealing*, easier to approach and easier to find. Kisstester is nice but well we need this page and whole maemo.org page. IMO there should brainstorm kind of page for testing area where there is different kind of top 10-list (ordered by votes, comments, date, clicks, day etc.) of apps in testing where people can comment, vote, report bugs etc.. How about talk area strictly for apps in testing & devel?

How to market your apps more vividly here in TMO or across whole maemo.org? Any platform ideas or how to integrate marketing of testing & devel "gems" to users? Current situation is that when you have been here 3 months non-stop and scavenged all different areas the whole maemo.org the web-page tree starts to build up in your brain and you end up thinking that everything is easy and can be found just couple of mouse clicks. WRONG! For example I can still remember the first days when I tried to understand structure of this page and my head hurt quite much...(sidenote I´m M.sc by education and I know that things should´n be this hard to me and if they are hard to me then I can only imagine how hard they are to most of people :| or maybe I´m just stupid...)


*On the other hand I can understand that it should not be too easy, but current situation where devels are given free hands to use variety of different kind of communication ways is bad in big picture because of fragmentation of communication ways to users. To learn wiki, garage, TMO, brainstorm, bugzilla, package page, etc. is _way_ way_ too complicated to most of users. From the point of devel it might be fun to have variety of ways to interact with users but from point of user it´s better to have ONE hammer to all.

----sidenote---
And moreover. I still haven't seen good wiki article where app testing from point of memory leaks is shown. Just one simple CASE where it´s shown what commands and what numbers testers should look for. All what I can find across Internet is unlimited mumbling and debate about what is real memory and Linux zealots wanking on trivial semantic problems. Look for example sysinternals http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/bb963890 Mark Russinovich's technical blog where he tells people how he uses these debugging apps on finding root of problems. I find these blogs very very easy to approach. Yes there is thousands of lines command line commands but to understand all of those you have to read every single manual (might be huge) and understand what every single switch does, why not just comment on side of command what all switches exactly do.

Re: Out of "devel" and into testing!
 

it is easy after you read this:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Help_testing_software