Ubuntu Wiki

Dev Week -- Working with Ubuntu<->GNOME QA (tips&tricks) - Pedro Villavicencio -- Mon, Sep 1

(04:04:33 PM) pedro_: Hello everybody my name is Pedro Villavicencio Garrido
(04:04:54 PM) pedro_: I'm currently living in Santiago de Chile, I'm the guy behind the Ubuntu Desktop Bugs and I work for Canonical since a little more than a year
(04:05:15 PM) pedro_: Today i will talk to you a bit about the Ubuntu+GNOME QA
(04:05:26 PM) pedro_: everybody knows what GNOME is ?
(04:05:47 PM) pedro_: alright! well for those who don't know it
(04:06:12 PM) pedro_: The GNOME project provides you of two things the GNOME Desktop environment an intuitive and attractive desktop (blink ;-)) for users and the GNOME development platform  which is an extensive and rich framework for building applications that integrate with the rest of the Desktop
(04:06:34 PM) pedro_: And if you haven't noticed... it's the default desktop of Ubuntu ;-)
(04:07:11 PM) pedro_: The latest stable relase of GNOME is GNOME 2.22 and since it's the default desktop of Ubuntu , GNOME 2.22 is available in Hardy if you want to try it
(04:07:29 PM) pedro_: if you want to use the development release of GNOME which is GNOME 2.23.90 there's a few ways to do it
(04:07:44 PM) pedro_: The first one is to download Ubuntu Intrepid from http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ , but for example if you're using Hardy and you don't want to upgrade to Intrepid but you really want to use GNOME what you can do is build GNOME from the source, there's two ways for doing this
(04:08:16 PM) pedro_: 1) Using GARNOME
(04:08:33 PM) pedro_: GARNOME is a build utility that allows you to build GNOME from latest tarballs, both the stable and unstable branch, it's pretty easy to use and actively maintained the only bad thing is that it doesn't support building from SVN... but we have another tool for that
(04:08:48 PM) pedro_: 2) Jhbuild
(04:09:06 PM) pedro_: if you're brave enough you can build GNOME with jhbuild which allows you to build the latest modules from GNOME the SVN, is way more flexible than GARNOME, you can build an specific branch like GNOME 2.18, 2.16, etc or use bleeding edge software (GNOME trunk), it's not really recommended for beginners but if you want to learn how GNOME is build it's perfect.
(04:09:47 PM) pedro_: I currently use Jhbuild for testing and if you're interested I've put my jhbuildrc file at http://www.gnome.org/~pvillavi/jhbuild/
(04:10:26 PM) pedro_: you can also look to http://live.gnome.org/JhbuildOnUbuntu  if want to see what you need to do in order to build your GNOME in Ubuntu with jhbuild
(04:10:55 PM) pedro_: and if you're having issues with it, there's a page of common issues when building: http://live.gnome.org/JhbuildIssues
(04:11:08 PM) pedro_: if your problem is not listed there, that's probably a bug and should be reported ;-)
(04:11:37 PM) pedro_: <emet> QUESTION: Do these build tools output packages?
(04:11:50 PM) pedro_: emet: no they don't do it
(04:12:17 PM) pedro_: <apachelogger> QUESTION: are there daily packages for ubuntu, or are there plans to get such a thing running?
(04:12:55 PM) pedro_: apachelogger: that might be difficult to do and not really necessary since there's no GNOME releases each day and also the desktop team is really good at packaging those in just a few hours
(04:13:16 PM) pedro_: but it would be a really good question for the desktop testing talk at Thursday ;-)
(04:13:37 PM) pedro_: alright, did you wondered how many space do you need to build?
(04:13:53 PM) pedro_: between sources, build and install
(04:13:57 PM) pedro_: you need ~10 gb for all
(04:14:29 PM) pedro_: if you like to build things there's a project at GNOME called the Build Brigade
(04:14:41 PM) pedro_: what they do is to automate discovery and reporting of GNOME build errors to make the testing of the development version easy for everyone, finding the build errors and regressions quickly
(04:14:59 PM) pedro_: if you have your browser open
(04:15:06 PM) pedro_: you can have a look to http://build.gnome.org
(04:15:20 PM) pedro_: where you can see a pretty nice resume about all the GNOME modules, the red ones are the ones that failed to build and the green ones represent the ones that the build was successful
(04:16:14 PM) pedro_: so if you have a spare machine and are interested on testing you can join them at #build-brigade in irc.gnome.org and yes you can also subscribe to their mailing list and ask things : http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/build-brigade-list
(04:16:24 PM) pedro_: help is always needed and both projects will benefit of that ;-)
(04:16:46 PM) cprov is now known as cprov-afk
(04:17:07 PM) pedro_: is anybody familiar with the Ubuntu Bugsquad?
(04:17:12 PM) pedro_: you know those awesome people?
(04:17:21 PM) pedro_: well in GNOME we also have a GNOME Bugsquad
(04:17:38 PM) pedro_: The GNOME Bugsquad is the Quality Assurance team for GNOME, which basically keep track of the current bugs in GNOME and try to make sure that major bugs do not go unnoticed by developers
(04:17:45 PM) pedro_: the same mission as the Ubuntu Bugsquad ;-)
(04:18:01 PM) pedro_: Those bugs are being tracked in the GNOME Bugzilla which is located at bugzilla.gnome.org, everybody can help you only need to create an account also the Bugsquad hangs out in IRC at the #bugs channel on irc.gnome.org so if you have any questions regarding a report the best place to ask is there unless is something really technical in that case you can ask to the module maintainer
(04:19:43 PM) pedro_: but hey what about getting permission for triage, if you want to have it, you need to read the Triage Guide at http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad and after that ask for the permissions at #bugs
(04:20:04 PM) pedro_: the general disclaimers are : 1) Use common sense and 2) If unsure, ask at the channel first
(04:20:09 PM) pedro_: nothing too complex as you can see
(04:20:26 PM) pedro_: When working with the GNOME Bugzilla you'll be winning some points
(04:20:34 PM) pedro_: and no you can't change them for t-shirts
(04:21:04 PM) pedro_: the more work you do the more points you'll have . same as karma at Launchpad
(04:21:28 PM) pedro_: In Ubuntu we also have a team that take care of the GNOME Bugs
(04:21:42 PM) pedro_: that team is called the Ubuntu Desktop Bugs
(04:22:26 PM) pedro_: the team is basically the awesome seb128, me and a few outstanding community members ;-)
(04:22:41 PM) pedro_: we always need help so if you like GNOME, Ubuntu and want to help us, you're more than welcome ;-)
(04:22:59 PM) pedro_: <apachelogger> QUESTION: can one merge the gnome bugzilla points and lp karma to become ubercool?
(04:23:11 PM) pedro_: apachelogger: haha no sadly you can't but hey submit a feature request :-P
(04:23:44 PM) pedro_: if you're wondering which packages we keep track well the list is located at: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/~desktop-bugs/+packagebugs as you can see they are ~110 packages which is a lot of work
(04:24:12 PM) pedro_: If we same some spare time we also do some triage at these products: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME/UniverseList If you want to adopt a package and do some triage work on it you're free to go ;-)
(04:25:26 PM) pedro_: the team hang out at #ubuntu-bugs so if you want to join the team just drop by and say hi ;-)
(04:25:40 PM) pedro_: the launchpad page is : https://edge.launchpad.net/~desktop-bugs
(04:26:09 PM) pedro_: and yeah while doing work with Launchpad you also win points but in launchpad they are called Karma
(04:26:41 PM) pedro_: One of our tasks is also forward bugs upstream
(04:27:30 PM) pedro_: since you're already know how to get help and briefly how to GNOME Bugsquad works, I'll introduce you to the forward Ubuntu GNOME related ones
(04:27:55 PM) pedro_: first steps well, you need a bugzilla account, if you don't have one http://bugzilla.gnome.org/createaccount.cgi
(04:27:59 PM) pedro_: you only need a valid email ;-)
(04:28:24 PM) pedro_: after that well you need to search the Bugzilla database in oder to see if the bug was already reported
(04:28:51 PM) pedro_: if you go to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/query.cgi
(04:29:03 PM) pedro_: you'll see the basic search functionality of bugzilla
(04:29:26 PM) pedro_: one of the common mistakes people do when searching is not searching for the closed bugs
(04:29:40 PM) pedro_: let's take for example a query with the string "i love ubuntu"
(04:30:11 PM) hubuntu- is now known as hubuntu
(04:30:16 PM) pedro_: if you search for it, bugzilla will return you "zarro boogs found"
(04:30:33 PM) pedro_: OMG nobody loves ubuntu :-(
(04:30:37 PM) pedro_: gnome people is so evil....
(04:30:50 PM) pedro_: but hey let's try something else
(04:31:09 PM) pedro_: we made that mistake, we didn't searched for the closed ones
(04:31:28 PM) pedro_: so let's try this, let's search with this text: "i love ubuntu" meta-status:all
(04:31:53 PM) pedro_: meta-status:all means show me all the bugs containing "i love ubuntu" i don't care about the status , just please show me those
(04:32:12 PM) pedro_: now you'll get results!!
(04:32:17 PM) pedro_: woohoo people love us again!
(04:33:16 PM) pedro_: that was just a brief example if you want to read more about it you can take a look to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=boogle-help.html
(04:33:29 PM) pedro_: you can basically search by status, gnome-version, os, target, assignee, etc
(04:34:12 PM) pedro_: ok before sending our bug upstream is also good to have a look to the list of the more frequent reported bugs http://bugzilla.gnome.org/duplicates.cgi
(04:34:55 PM) pedro_: searching is a bit difficult if you don't really know how the software works and you can easily spend a few minutes on it
(04:35:06 PM) pedro_: for example searching for a stacktraces that matches one submitted at Ubuntu, the basic way is to go to the simple search and start copy & paste a few of the function names into it, which is not very optimal...
(04:35:39 PM) pedro_: and well the GNOME Bugzilla has a very cool feature called the "Simple Dup Finder" which allows you to of course find duplicates and if you used the gnome bugzilla before you probably saw it, on the reports there's a link at the top right which said "simple dup finder" if you click there it will show you the probably duplicates of that bug, but what if you want to search as said for a stacktrace what can you do?
(04:36:11 PM) pedro_: there's a cool trick for that too
(04:36:29 PM) pedro_: you can use the http://bugzilla.gnome.org/dupfinder/simple-dup-finder.cgi?  simple dup finder page
(04:36:41 PM) pedro_: and copy and paste the stacktrace or bug description there
(04:37:14 PM) pedro_: <kevjava> QUESTION: Are there parts of GNOME that seem to consistently need more attention?
(04:37:27 PM) pedro_: the big products always needs more attention, like the Evolution one
(04:37:43 PM) pedro_: nautilus and so on
(04:37:56 PM) pedro_: <xander21c> Question: Is there mentoring fot Gnome QA
(04:38:18 PM) kevjava: pedro_: Cool, thanks :).
(04:38:21 PM) pedro_: xander21c: yes, the mentoring of the Ubuntu GNOME ones is provided at #ubuntu-bugs and the one for GNOME at #bugs in irc.gnome.org
(04:38:58 PM) pedro_: so if you interested just join the channels and ask ;-)
(04:39:29 PM) pedro_: If the bug was reported what you need to do is to link the report in launchpad (aka create a bug watch), more instructions about this at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Watches
(04:39:43 PM) pedro_: i think that jorge mentioned that in his amazing talk
(04:39:59 PM) pedro_: so if you want to know more about it look at those logs ;-)
(04:40:12 PM) pedro_: but here's is one issue
(04:40:23 PM) pedro_: what if there's another report in launchpad linking to that report?
(04:40:26 PM) pedro_: how can you know it?
(04:40:38 PM) pedro_: we don't want to have 10 reports linking to the same one upstream
(04:40:49 PM) pedro_: those should be marked as duplicate and just have one master right?
(04:40:52 PM) pedro_: that's the right thing to do
(04:40:58 PM) pedro_: but ok how we can search for those?
(04:41:17 PM) pedro_: ok don't make too much noise i'll show you a secret...
(04:42:22 PM) pedro_: let's say we found the bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=506357
(04:42:24 PM) pedro_: upstream
(04:42:25 PM) ubot5: Gnome bug 506357 in screenshot "crash in Take Screenshot: taking a screen shot" [Critical,Unconfirmed]
(04:42:41 PM) pedro_: what we are going to do is : go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/bugtrackers/gnome-bugs/#bugnumber
(04:42:53 PM) pedro_: and replace #bugnumber for the bug number of the upstream one
(04:43:43 PM) pedro_: you'll be redirected to the bug in launchpad that is linking to the upstream one
(04:43:45 PM) pedro_: see magic!
(04:44:08 PM) pedro_: <RoAkSoAx> QUESTION: how can we get more involved with Gnome development (more related to MOTU work). Are there any specific task list where we can get started
(04:44:24 PM) pedro_: RoAkSoAx: yeah there's always tasks to do, I'd recommend to go trough the list of bugs marked as gnome-love
(04:45:15 PM) pedro_: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/gnome-love.cgi <- RoAkSoAx
(04:45:43 PM) pedro_: let's continue if the bug wasn't reported at all you can add a new one then
(04:45:57 PM) pedro_: for doing it you need to go to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi and select the right product and component, sometimes it's hard to find the right component in big products like Evolution, but follow your common sense, if the bug describe issues with reading, writing emails well the component is Mailer, is the problem is with contacts, probably the right component is Contacts and so on
(04:46:22 PM) pedro_: most of the products have a list describing their components so taking the same example the list of components of the Evolution product is here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Evolution
(04:46:45 PM) pedro_: You also need to be carefully with reports from evince for example
(04:47:03 PM) pedro_: people tend to reports bugs about rendering in Evince which is in most of the cases wrong
(04:47:31 PM) pedro_: poppler is the rendering backend for evince and such bugs should be filled at their bug tracker
(04:47:51 PM) pedro_: so double check them before submit any of those at the GNOME Bugzilla
(04:49:11 PM) pedro_: one of the last considerations is to choose the right Keyword
(04:49:42 PM) pedro_: if you're submitting a bug with a good stacktrace, you need to add the STACKTRACE keyword to the report
(04:49:57 PM) pedro_: if is a bug about usability, well the usability keyword and so on
(04:50:15 PM) pedro_: the list of keywords can be found here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/describekeywords.cgi
(04:50:35 PM) pedro_: be sure to use them and again if you're unsure just ask :-)
(04:52:14 PM) pedro_: after the bug was forwarded what you need to do is to create a bug watch linking to the bug you just submitted upstream, it'll be updated regularly and will reflect the status of the upstream bug report
(04:52:30 PM) pedro_: instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Watches
(04:53:33 PM) pedro_: that's almost the whole process of forwarding a bug to the GNOME Bugzilla
(04:53:48 PM) pedro_: and linking it to launchpad also
(04:54:33 PM) pedro_: now it's up to the maintainers to have a look to it in order to fix it, or why not you if you're interested
(04:55:45 PM) pedro_: as said previously we have to deal with toons of bugs daily and we always need help so if you like GNOME and Ubuntu as we do
(04:56:29 PM) pedro_: feel free to join us and ask a lot of questions, asking is not bad so the more the best ;-)
(04:58:20 PM) pedro_: I think that's all if you have any questions later feel free to send an email to me or to the ubuntu bugsquad mailing list or why not ask it on the IRC channels, we are most of the time there and well there's always people willing to help new bugsquaders
(04:58:36 PM) pedro_: thanks everybody and hope to see you around soon ;-)