Re: UI freeze break request for GNOME Shell

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 8:35 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> Meta: How can we prevent these kinds of late-cycle changes in the
> future?

Testable[0]. And OSTree, hopefully.


> Part of the problem may be implementing from mockups with
> insufficient specification of behavior. But there will always be
> implementation issues you don't anticipate in design specs.

Yes. And some ideas appear absolutely fantastic when written in a
spec, but just don't work out when you sit in front of the
implementation. Reevaluating design specs by testing the
implementation as early as possible and refining the design based on
the results is essential here in my opinion. Ideally designers should
start evaluating a feature as it lands, so that code and design can
evolve in parallel. Unfortunately jhbuild is not exactly a friendly
tool for non-developers (in particular mid-cycle, where running a
build without breakage by one dependency or another is the rare
exception). And as we start to integrate more deeply with lower
layers, jhbuild doesn't work at all. Around Guadec time, fully testing
the code in development basically required running a bleeding edge
system like Rawhide, with a couple of system packages replaced by
versions built straight from git.

Discussion on how to improve this took up a good part of the GnomeOS
BOF at Guadec for a reason - and the resulting initiatives around
automatic builds, QA and early testing hopefully will bear fruits
soon.


> What about a concerted effort to test implementations against the
> designs immediately following the freeze?

I don't think that's good enough. Coincidentally, Allan filed this
particular bug the very same day of the freeze, but between some back
and forth between coders and designers, getting patches written and
reviewed and working on quite a list of other fixes for 3.6.1, we
still ended up as late as now.

We will need to do better, but there's hope we actually will.


Florian


[0] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Testable