Desktop Team Meeting September 18th, 2007

Agenda

• Preview (5 min): Done! We released Monday September 10th and, so far, nothing blew up. If you want to know about the download figure, please check out the Jared's dashboard (no relationship with Chandler's feature of the same name). It's time to try to recruit/evangelize to users and potential contributors. Share your observations on the users or design list. Anyone having a story to tell?
• 0.7.1 (10 min): Since we are somewhat in a lurch as to which SVN strategy to follow, we are currently using the previous commit policy (i.e. bug + review before commit). We are starting a branch (recorded_script) for John's changes so that we don't destabilize the trunk while testing this. Is anyone blocked right now by this?
• Post Preview Desktop Strategy (15 min):
  • Move to scheduled releases: I haven't sent an email yet though I discussed with some of you about the idea. I'm proposing that we move to a "schedule driven release" model away from a "feature driven release" model. Looks like a monthly release would work for QA and others. I'd like the group to comment on that during the meeting.
  • There's a debate right now following Katie's email. Please feel free to participate to the threads. Also, use the appropriate mailing list (the strategy list is better when discussing revenue models for instance). Anyone want to discuss this thread?
• Meetings (10 min): Should we blow this popsicle stand? I'm feeling that this meeting is somewhat inefficient, meaning that most interesting discussions happen either on list or on IRC. Since we are changing how we work, may be we should change that too. Proposal open for discussion: suppress this "in person" meeting and move to a weekly IRC meeting form. Agenda will be standardized (what are people working on, help they need, some general messages I need to share if any). Thoughts?
• Misc : (5 min)
  • Sprint week and celebration: It's next week! Check the Office Calendar for an agenda of the meetings and activities.
  • Have something to announce? Issues to bring to the group? Please take the stage, er, mic.

Minutes

Preview

Some folks shared their demo stories:

• John: learning curve is deeper than we thought, but it's hard to make the trade off between facilitating the first 10 minutes experience and making the long term usability good
• Philippe: feels that we are getting now the usability testing feedback we didn't do
• Heikki: suggests we could use screen recording software to get more data on how people use the application
• John: thinks that, when testing, we should try to get answers to a very narrow question
• Jeffrey: has shown the product to friends, not sure they adopted it though
• Reid: mentions that his wife had firewall issues using Chandler from work

Move to scheduled releases

We discussed the pros and cons on sticking to such a system:

• BKirsch: Q: how do we develop big features (e.g. Contact)?
• Philippe: A: we'll use dev branches for those and make merges to trunk only when the branch has been validated by QA
• Heikki: thinks that a monthly release is too frequent. Doesn't want to do that as a user.
• Jeffrey: summarizes the argument saying we need to make an effort on the release notes so that users can choose.
• Heikki: notes that it would be better to have the software itself prompting about updates. Doing auto update is lots of engineering efforts though.
• Reid: points out that some other Open Source apps do that pretty well (using sparkle on Mac). Users without admin rights would have problems though.
• Stearns: Q: how we decide what makes it in the releases?
• Philippe: A: whatever made it to trunk at the pickup date
• Andi: reminds people that Chandler tried before and it was difficult, we are in a different state now though (with an existing shipped product)
• Reid: thinks that 6 weeks would be better: 4/5 weeks of development and 1/2 weeks of debug/stabilization
• Heikki: advices to only merge dev branches at the beginning of a cycle
• Jeffrey: questions the reason for more releases. Isn't it better to have checkpoints? What do we think we gain spinning releases?
• John: answers that more releases forces us to test more, benefits more customers (the ones who won't apply patches) quicker.

In the end, no decision or consensus clearly reached. Philippe to bring the issue to the dev list.

Meetings

We talked about having meeting on IRC rather than on the phone. Pluses of IRC meetings is that they are recorded (easier to get notes...), allow potential contributors to "lurk" and are a little more free form than phoned meetings. Debate:

• Reid: as a remote person prefers IRC
• Kirsch: actually likes hearing the voices of people (note: BKirsch's voice is always the clearer in Gotham, may be other remote folks would like to use the same handset/hardware he's using).
• Jeffrey: sees the benefit of being face to face and hearing the voices
• PJE: likes the phone better despite being remote, allows him to wander in the house during the meeting
• Jeffrey: likes having the in person meeting when it's during a not too stressful time (like now) as opposed to crunch times (like ship time)
• Jeffrey: proposes to try IRC every other week

Most people don't want to double the frequency of the meeting though. The approved proposal is to do the next Desktop meeting (October 2nd) on IRC and see how that worked.

Status

Andi

• http://people.osafoundation.org/~vajda/logs.cgi

Brian (bkirsch)

• Fixed Bug 10828 using Mac OSX 10.4 IMAP Server
• Fixed Bug 10717 Weird error dialog title when sending mail
• Fixed Bug 10716 Mail error message has extra (unicode?) "u" in it
• Almost finished with Bug 8874 Chandler email body text tweaks
• Added an expand argument to the Chandler command line that will grow translatable strings by a percentage for text expansion checking. For example, --expand 45 will expand all strings running through the Chandler translation service by 45%.
• Cleaned up the --locale test command line argument which adds a \u00FC around all translatable strings for confirmation that user level strings are being translated.
• Need to track down "Chandler Hub sharing" issue. The string is not currently localizing in the UIK
• Need to fix doctest to work with non-ascii paths for Bug 3740 Build a Tinderbox that runs in a non-ascii locale / charset
  

Bryan (stearns)

• Working on the detail view date expando thing.
• Experimenting with a custom sizer to see if it'll meet our needs for expando wrapping, as well as label-width management and baseline alignment in the detail view

Grant

• Your status here...

Jeffrey

• Your status here...

John

• I spent the week fixing gazillions of script recording bugs with dialogs and finally got recording to play back going in a bunch of situations, however I still need to fix the verification code during playback.

• Continued to track down a number of bugs with script verification. This lead to a new approach to tracking focus the focus window.
• I got dialog script verification going in my test cases.
• While working verification I realized that my upcoming refactoring of how I record and find widgets was going to affect the problems I was running into during testing, so I decide to take the plunge and do this refactoring sooner rather than later. So I tackled this major refactoring. The dust is still settling. This change will break the format of the existing recorded scripts.
• I'm hoping to have completely refactored new code and new tests ready for checkin by the end of the week. I will do a branch so that I'll be able to run tinderboxes on the new tests to make sure the tree stays green.

Morgen

• Your status here...

Philippe (pbossut)

• Your status here...

Phillip (PJE)

• Your status here...

Reid

• Your status here...

Robin

• Worked on tracking down and fixing bugs for the wxPython 2.8.5.0 release.
• Continued support of Google Summer of Code student, and wrapping up work on his project.
• Support and answers for other OSAF developers on wx related issues.
• Working out how to best do another merge from upstream wx source tree in the the OSAF wx tree, now that they are no longer using CVS.
• Various community support activities via email and IRC.

-- PhilippeBossut - 18 Sep 2007