papercuts-ninja team mailing list archive

[Chris Wilson <notgary@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Timothy,

Thanks a lot for your input. All of this is really helpful and insightful.

On 20 November 2012 03:02, Timothy Arceri <t_arceri@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 1. The raring release seems to be targeting a lot of Ubuntu specific items
> Unity, Ubuntu Software Centre, Ubuntu One Control Panel, USC Application
> descriptions. Obviously the Hundred Paper Cuts project is here to improve
> Ubuntu but I feel 4/10 targets that focus only on Ubuntu specific items is
> to many especially when most of these products are revenue generating
> products for Canonical I have little motivation to work on them. This is
> all of course just my opinion.
>

I've been thinking about what we should be targeting ever since I started
this whole thing. You definitely raise a very good point about the large
quantity of Ubuntu-specific apps in the list, and I've been trying to
figure out how to balance good coverage of the desktop with focusing the
efforts of the team so we can get more done.

In the next cycle, we should have more milestones. I was thinking of ten
milestone with ten bugs each. Maybe we could have more milestones. I'm not
really sure how to go about this yet. If you have any ideas then I'd
welcome them.


> I do however have a suggestion for a new target to replace one of these
> items and that is GTK+. <snip>
> Anyway I think you get my point and I would be very interested to see what
> other high impact GTK bugs we can dig up.
>

That's a very good point. In the past, GTK+ has been listed as a milestone
with equal precedence to all the others, so GTK+ would have a milestone
with 7 bugs targeted, Music/Video would likewise have 10-12 bugs.

Maybe GTK+ should be singled out for preferential treatment. If we're going
to fix 100 bugs in a cycle, perhaps we could aim for 25 of them to be in
GTK+. Perhaps we could even aim higher. It's still very early in the cycle
so there's plenty of time to change things up.

If we were going to do this, then we'd have to decide how we were going to
treat GTK+2.0, since that's more of a legacy package nowadays, with GTK+3.0
being what ships on the CD. Will be backport fixes from 3.0 to 2.0? Bear in
mind that a lot has been fixed in 3.0 and many bugs could be fixed by the
applications themselves upgrading to 3.0. It would be great to backport
them if there's a need, but I don't think it's a good idea to spend a lot
of time working on bugs in 2.0 when there's still plenty to be done in both
3.0 and other apps.

Again, thoughts and ideas welcome.

2. My second thing I wanted to mention is in regard to the ex-poser of this
> project.

<snip>

For this project we want users to be reporting bugs in a stable release
> that we can target for the next release, not the opposite which is what
> currently seems to happen.
>

A very good point. I'd never really thought of it like that before. That's
an excellent idea.

Maybe we could arrange some organised testing of target apps on 12.04,
perhaps spending up to a week per cycle just sitting down with the newest
release and firing off as many bugs as we can, before spending the rest of
the cycle fixing them.

This is where an automated papercut reporting tool (my idea would be either
`ubuntu-bug --papercut` or `ubuntu-papercut` which would be an alias of the
former) to streamline such a process. This is an idea I've had kicking
about for a while now and maybe this would be a good time to get something
done about it.

Anyway these are just two things I wanted to bring up. By the way Chris I
> think you have done an excellent job so far with bringing this project back
> to life. Hopefully with continued work we can attract a greater developer
> presence.
>

Thanks a lot for that. I really appreciate it :)

I think you've done a fantastic job in getting the bugs themselves fix.
Your ability to not just fix bugs in the apps themselves, but to dive deep
and get right into GTK+ itself is an invaluable skill that the paper cuts
project desperately needs. If we had two or three more people like you
looking at these bugs, we'd hit 100 every cycle without any problems. Thank
you so much for your effort.

Chris