ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 09:45:14PM -0500, Victor Thompson wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > Given the choice, which is better: to have slightly more frequent
> > breakage, but have key engineers be fresh and able to work on urgent
> > problems that come their way every so often; or to have our key
> > engineers concentrate hard every day to make sure as few regressions as
> > possible slip in, at the cost that when difficult problems show up
> > they're too tired and demotivated to deal with them properly?  I'm
> > worried that risk aversion means we tend to aim for the latter.
> 
> Frequent breakages that get put on a "list" while the project moves
> forward is exactly why the Terminal app had the backspace/enter
> regression for months.

I didn't say that bugs like that should be put on the shelf and ignored.
What I said was that management should absolutely be making sure that
the right people are working on that sort of thing, but without blocking
dozens of other engineers until it's done.

The probability of changes to the base system interfering in any
significant way with somebody's ability to sort out a core-app-level bug
like this is negligible.

> There are two paths to take right now for the music app bug:
>   1. Wait for the upstream QtMultimedia bug to be fixed [1]
>   2. Move aggressively towards the Media Hub component with playlist support
> 
> Given that the project's need to push features to the QA supported
> channel (I'm not convinced that most dogfooders are on the
> non-proposed channel anyway), I suggest we avoid the upstream battle
> and move towards integrating the Media Hub as quickly as possible.

I hope you're not suggesting that we stop the line until media-hub is
ready.  I've got no problem with the media-hub direction (indeed I
approved its feature freeze exception bug 1290360 recently); but from
the landing point of view it is a significant and large new chunk of
work.  It could easily take some time to stabilise in its own right.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx]