Re: Clarifying the development process/what to do with fixes that require a string change

[Andreas Røsdal <andrearo pvv ntnu no>]

On Sun, 25 Feb 2007, Thomas Mills Hinkle wrote:
> In GNOME Sudoku, I recently realized that users entering custom games can
> enter invalid games -- the program won't warn them that their game is
> invalid (and it will, in fact, register a high degree of difficulty for the
> game, since any game without a unique solution will require a lot of
> trial-and-error to solve). I wrote some code to warn the user if they enter
> an invalid game -- this seems like the minimal solution; it's unclear
> whether it would be good to allow users to play broken games or not
> (sometimes people publish broken games, so if someone wanted to enter it
> into the machine to solve, they might find it useful).
>
> At any rate, any solution I can think of requires a new string to tell the
> user the game is broken -- and as I understand it, we're past the string
> freeze, yes?
>
> I'm still new to the GNOME development cycle and I wanted to make sure I
> understood it right. I didn't want to commit a fix to svn that breaks the
> rules, but I also didn't want to risk forgetting about the fix during the
> next cycle. So is the idea that I wait until the 2.19 cycle to introduce my
> fix? If so, should I create a bug and attach a patch with the fix to the bug
> so we don't forget about it?

It's great that you are working on solving this! Yes, you have understood 
the development process and rules for string freezes correctly. Just 
create a bugreport with your patch attached in bugzilla, and we'll commit 
the fix during the 2.19 cycle. I don't think this bug is critical enough 
to request permission to break the string freeze. (but others may 
disagree?)

As you see here, http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointSeventeen ,
there is currently both a string freeze and user interface freeze, and in 
one week, there will also be a code freeze. So then no code can be 
modified before the 2.18.0 release.

I have gone through the list of bugs reported on gnome-sudoku up until 
now, and there are some which really really need fixing before 2.18.0 
release.  In particular, this bugreport has been reported 12 times by 
different people (12 duplicates): 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=409472

I have marked the bug as a "blocker", because it would wreck havoc if 
gnome-games got released with this bug unfixed. I have not been able to 
reproduce the crash myself, but based on the stacktrace it should be 
possible to fix. The dictionary key (conflict) is None, which is 
incorrect. Do you have any suggestions for how to solve it?

The release candidate for GNOME 2.18 is due on February 26th, so I really 
hope that anyone interested in seeing a bugfree release of gnome-games 
help out with solving the outstanding bugs, in particular the 44 new 
reported to glchess and gnome-sudoku:
http://tinyurl.com/2kvsg7


  - Andreas