Recently the Nokia testers have started to report bugs against the Essen branch. This is part of the Nokia effort to open up the development process and put it more into the open, something I think we should be grateful for.
However, this hasn't been well received everywhere. Thomas has moved the resolution of these bugs to WAIT [1] and asking that the testing be done against trunk instead. He writes:
"Please test against the main branch and not an unstable
feature branch thats not supported by the KOffice core team.
Feel free to reopen if the bug exists in the main branch. "
I can see his point, but I thought that I would ask the rest of the community about this. Here are the facts:
- Nokia is going to test the Essen branch since that is what is being used for their releases. Once trunk is open for features again, this will move back to trunk.
- Most bugs exist in both the branch and trunk. Some (a few?) bugs only exist in branch, of course.
So, I can see these alternatives:
1. Nokia is allowed to report bugs against the branch.
2. Nokia is not allowed to report bugs and will move back to the internal Maemo.org bugzilla.
In case 1, there will be a few bugs that cannot be reproduced in trunk. That is a cost, but in my mind not very high. In return we will get a lot of bugs reported that would otherwise go unnoticed by us.
In case 2, we will save some work (won't have to check the bugs against trunk) but we miss out on a lot of bugs. It will also mean a setback to the opening up process.
So, what do you think? My own opinion is that alternative 1 is better and that it's not very difficult to ignore the bugs that are against the branch if you don't like them. After the freeze is lifted, they will be moved to trunk anyway, or closed if the bug in question doesn't exist any more.
-Inge