Extras-testing
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.
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Target: Maemo 5 testers
Power users willing to help Maemo 5 developers getting their apps ready are encouraged to activate this repository.
Applications in extras-testing might break and cause trouble to your system! Regular users are encouraged to stay away.
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 evaluate lightly an application! If you are busy or in a hurry just let others do the job.
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.