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Extras-testing

Revision as of 06:15, 27 October 2009

The software hosted in extras-testing is not be ready for ordinary users! The software may put your tablet in an unresponsive state and may require flashing. Please don't download software from extras-testing if you haven't backed up your data or are prepared to re-flash your device.

The maemo.org extras-testing repository hosts community applications and related packages that are waiting to be evaluated and promoted to Maemo 5 Extras. The packages hosted here are promoted from extras-devel and have gone through an automated quality check. Now they need real humans assessing that they are indeed ready to be released.

Community Quality Assurance

Offering good quality community software to owners of Maemo devices is a top priority. We have a chance to show the world that open source software developed by community projects can match commercial software in terms of features, usability, reliability and fun. But we also face the risk of getting maemo.org Extras associated with beta quality software made by geeks for geeks only, without the last mile of polishing.

This is why we have put a community QA process in place in order to help developers to get their software ready for end users. Free community certification for free software.

You can help improve this QA process. Feel free to check the discussion page and the Talk discussion thread.

How it works in practice

Developers upload their software to Extras-devel, the unstable repository. extras-devel is where anything can break and where no end users are expected unless they know perfectly well what they are doing. When the developer of an application thinks that it's ready for the masses, he or she promotes it to extras-testing. There is a series of automatic tests to filter the jump from extras-devel to extras-testing already. If everything is ok, the application ends up in extras-testing, and from that point it will be subject to a human evaluation.

How to activate Extras-testing

Users willing to give a hand testing and evaluating community applications must start activating the extras-testing repository in the Application Manager of their Maemo 5 compatible device.

Application manager --> Application catalogs --> New
Catalog name: maemo.org extras-testing
Web address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-testing
Distribution: fremantle
Components: free non-free

Packages waiting to be evaluated

• Power users can install any of the user applications and start the evaluation.
• Developers might want to have a look to the full list of packages as well.

Quality Assurance criteria

There are several elements to be considered before voting Up/Down. Please take your time looking at them. Don't lightly evaluate an application! If you are busy or in a hurry, perhaps let others do the testing.

If you want to help evaluating one application follow the Extras-testing QA_Checklist

Thumbs Up

Don't vote up an application before having a good understanding of its quality based on your own testing and the opinion of other contributors involved.

Thumbs Down

Whenever you decide to vote an application down, please leave a comment describing what issues you found. The best feedback is a bug number, since this allow to track and discuss better the problems. Voting thumbs down without any explanation doesn't help the developer getting better software for you and the end users.

Promotion / Demotion NOT FINAL FIXME

An application is promoted to Extras when these criteria are fulfilled:

• At least 10 days of quarantine
• Karma 10 or more (1 vote up = 1 karma point / 1 vote down = -4 karma points)
• At least 3 members of the testers group have voted. (((what is the testers group needs to be defined, but they are meant to be senior and reliable contributors)))

An application is demoted to Extras-devel when blockers are found by at least 5 voters, or when the own developer decides to demote the version candidate.

Tools for testers

Testing tools help finding non-obvious flaws and getting useful data from visible problems.

All the tools mentioned below are available from the Maemo 5 SDK tools repository. Even though the repository is intended for SDK use, all tools in the repository can be run on-device as well.

To activate the tools repository go through the following steps:

Application manager --> Application catalogs --> New
Catalog name: Maemo 5 SDK tools
Web address: http://repository.maemo.org/
Distribution: fremantle/tools
Components: free non-free

The tools in the tools repository are command line utilities, so they will not add applications to the application manager list of downloadable applications. This also means that the tools need to be installed from the X terminal as root. Use rootsh from extras to gain root access.

To get an idea of what kind of tools are/will be in the Maemo 5 SDK tools repository see the Maemo 4.1 SDK tools.

Several things can be observed from the application to give an idea of whether it is performing as it should. For all these areas tools exist to analyse the application.

Process tracing

Tracing process activity can tell whether the application is working as it should, but it is also a good indicator of battery usage. If an application wakes up unnecessarily (i.e. no user interaction or absolutely mandatory timed operations) this can be seen in traces.

Memory usage

Following memory use for leaks.

Network traffic

Network use can also be looked at to see whether the application is behaving as expected.

Power consumption

For widgets: Users should run as root the command "powertop" before and after adding the widget to the desktop. Symptoms of a power-hungry application are a large increase in the number of overall wakeups from the "hildon-home" process.