Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with firefox be a release blocker?

[Jonathan Kamens]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477639

[Brian Pepple]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 09:13 -0400, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477639
>   
No, I don't believe that meets the release blocker criteria.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/ReleaseCriteria

Later,
/B
-- 
Brian Pepple <bpepple(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Bpepple
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 810CC15E
BD5E 6F9E 8688 E668 8F5B  CBDE 326A E936 810C C15E

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Jonathan Kamens]

I think search is, nowadays, critical functionality, not only because it 
is widely used, but because it is built into those other two big 
operating systems Linux is competing with.

I think putting out a release in which search is non-functional for the 
two most important types of data (email and Web pages), when search 
/was/ functional for those two types of data in the previous release, 
would be extremely unwise and a big black eye for Fedora.

While I understand the need to have relatively sane criteria for what 
constitutes a release blocker, it is also, as the ReleaseCriteria page 
points out, essentially a subjective judgment, and in this case I think 
that looking at the forest, rather than the trees, would lead to the 
conclusion that F11 shouldn't ship with these two bugs unfixed.

Especially since they will probably be quite easy to fix once a 
developer actually pays attention to them.

   jik

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Brian Pepple]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 09:24 -0400, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
>  I think search is, nowadays, critical functionality, not only
> because
>  it is widely used, but because it is built into those other two big
>  operating systems Linux is competing with.
>  
>  I think putting out a release in which search is non-functional for
>  the two most important types of data (email and Web pages), when
>  search was functional for those two types of data in the previous
>  release, would be extremely unwise and a big black eye for Fedora.
>  
>  While I understand the need to have relatively sane criteria for what
>  constitutes a release blocker, it is also, as the ReleaseCriteria page
>  points out, essentially a subjective judgment, and in this case I
>  think that looking at the forest, rather than the trees, would lead to
>  the conclusion that F11 shouldn't ship with these two bugs unfixed. 
If we installed Beagle by default I would probably agree with you, but
since we don't I don't think these bugs should be considered a blocker
for release.  But hey that's just my opinion, maybe the QA leads think
differently.

Later,
/B
-- 
Brian Pepple <bpepple(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Bpepple
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 810CC15E
BD5E 6F9E 8688 E668 8F5B  CBDE 326A E936 810C C15E

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 05/22/2009 01:48 PM, Brian Pepple wrote:
>  On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 09:24 -0400, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
>     
> > I think search is, nowadays, critical functionality, not only because
> > it is widely used, but because it is built into those other two big
> > operating systems Linux is competing with.
> >
> > I think putting out a release in which search is non-functional for
> > the two most important types of data (email and Web pages), when
> > search was functional for those two types of data in the previous
> > release, would be extremely unwise and a big black eye for Fedora.
> >
> > While I understand the need to have relatively sane criteria for what
> > constitutes a release blocker, it is also, as the ReleaseCriteria page
> > points out, essentially a subjective judgment, and in this case I
> > think that looking at the forest, rather than the trees, would lead to
> > the conclusion that F11 shouldn't ship with these two bugs unfixed.
> >      
>  If we installed Beagle by default I would probably agree with you, but
>  since we don't I don't think these bugs should be considered a blocker
>  for release.  But hey that's just my opinion, maybe the QA leads think
>  differently.
>
>      
Agreed

Since this is not part of the "default install" it should not be considered
a blocker bug.

JBG

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Jonathan Kamens]

On 05/22/2009 09:56 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>  Since this is not part of the "default install" it should
> not be 
>  considered
>  a blocker bug. 
It seems to me that the fact that Fedora does not have a desktop
search 
engine included in its default install could itself be considered a 
significant enough functionality gap to constitute a bug.

   jik

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 22 May 2009 09:59:14 -0400
Jonathan Kamens wrote:

>  It seems to me that the fact that Fedora does not have a desktop
> search 
>  engine included in its default install could itself be considered a 
>  significant enough functionality gap to constitute a bug. 
Unless beagle has improved since it was being installed by default
when it first appeared to much fanfare (yet no documentation :-),
I certainly wouldn't want it back.

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Seth Vidal]

On Fri, 22 May 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:

>  Unless beagle has improved since it was being installed by default
>  when it first appeared to much fanfare (yet no documentation :-),
>  I certainly wouldn't want it back. 
I don't know anything about the status of beagle - but as a general rule - 
if some package you used a while back is still around and still being 
worked on then chances are good it has improved.

-sv

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 22 May 2009 10:12:57 -0400 (EDT)
Seth Vidal wrote:

>  if some package you used a while back is still around and still being
>
>  worked on then chances are good it has improved. 
And if it is open source, chances are good it still has no
documentation :-).

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Seth Vidal]

On Fri, 22 May 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:

>  On Fri, 22 May 2009 10:12:57 -0400 (EDT)
>  Seth Vidal wrote:
>
> > if some package you used a while back is still around and still being
> > worked on then chances are good it has improved.
>
>  And if it is open source, chances are good it still has no
>  documentation :-). 
And since it is open source, instead of just being snarky about it - you 
can actually contribute to that project and fix the lack of code.

-sv

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Christopher A Williams]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 10:23 -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
>  
>  On Fri, 22 May 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:
>  
>  > On Fri, 22 May 2009 10:12:57 -0400 (EDT)
>  > Seth Vidal wrote:
>  >
>  >> if some package you used a while back is still around and still being
>  >> worked on then chances are good it has improved.
>  >
>  > And if it is open source, chances are good it still has no
>  > documentation :-).
>  
>  And since it is open source, instead of just being snarky about it - you 
>  can actually contribute to that project and fix the lack of code. 
Quote alleged from the book, "Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche" on
documenting your code: "Look, if it was hard to write, it should be hard
to understand!" :) 

-- 
======================
"Only two things are infinite,
the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former."

-- Albert Einstein

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[stan]

Christopher A. Williams wrote:
>  On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 10:23 -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
> > On Fri, 22 May 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:
> >
> >> On Fri, 22 May 2009 10:12:57 -0400 (EDT)
> >> Seth Vidal wrote:
> >>
> >>> if some package you used a while back is still around and still being
> >>> worked on then chances are good it has improved.
> >> And if it is open source, chances are good it still has no
> >> documentation :-).
> > And since it is open source, instead of just being snarky about it - you 
> > can actually contribute to that project and fix the lack of code.
>  
>  Quote alleged from the book, "Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche" on
>  documenting your code: "Look, if it was hard to write, it should be hard
>  to understand!" :) 
>   
Speaking as an (ex?) programmer, writing the code is fun, writing the
documentation is pure drudgery.  And really, the 
only person who can realistically write documentation is the programmer.  They know all
the ins and outs of the code, 
and the functionality they programmed in.  It can be done through an intermediary, someone
who questions the programmers 
and finds out the functionality and then writes it in comprehensible language, but the
chance that someone unfamiliar 
with the code is going to write decent documentation is pretty slim.

Of course, in the days when code was written to specs, the specs were the kernel of the
documentation and only needed to 
be modified with changes.  I don't think there are such things as specs in the open
source world, just some general 
vision statement of what the software should accomplish, usually about as detailed as the
description from the RPM. :-)

Writing Documentation (was: Re: Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?)

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 11:10 -0700, stan wrote:
>  Speaking as an (ex?) programmer, writing the code is fun, writing
> the
>  documentation is pure drudgery.  And really, the 
>  only person who can realistically write documentation is the
>  programmer.  They know all the ins and outs of the code, 
>  and the functionality they programmed in.  It can be done through an
>  intermediary, someone who questions the programmers 
>  and finds out the functionality and then writes it in comprehensible
>  language, but the chance that someone unfamiliar 
>  with the code is going to write decent documentation is pretty slim.
>  
>  Of course, in the days when code was written to specs, the specs were
>  the kernel of the documentation and only needed to 
>  be modified with changes.  I don't think there are such things as
>  specs in the open source world, just some general 
>  vision statement of what the software should accomplish, usually about
>  as detailed as the description from the RPM. :-) 
My view is that if the programmer can't write a lucid description of
what his stuff does, it means he doesn't really understand it himself.
This doesn't mean writing a three-line comment for every internal
function, it means having a coherent conception of what your program is
for and how it works, and being able to explain at least the former at a
level appropriate to the target user.

There's a strong correlation between good code and good docs. The idea
that writing the docs is drudge-work best left to an intern does profund
damage to the image of programming as a serious activity.

poc

Writing Documentation (was: Re: Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?)

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 22 May 2009 14:19:08 -0430
Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:

>  My view is that if the programmer can't write a lucid description
> of
>  what his stuff does, it means he doesn't really understand it himself. 
I wouldn't go that far. Writing (especially in that ridiculous language
known as English by Americans and American by all other English speakers)
can be a major challenge :-).

But I will say that developers who don't even make the slightest
attempt to document their work are saying (to me anyway): "We
don't want anyone to use this, that's why we keep it a secret."

Writing Documentation (was: Re: Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?)

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 16:00 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
>  On Fri, 22 May 2009 14:19:08 -0430
>  Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>  
>  > My view is that if the programmer can't write a lucid description of
>  > what his stuff does, it means he doesn't really understand it himself.
>  
>  I wouldn't go that far. Writing (especially in that ridiculous language
>  known as English by Americans and American by all other English speakers)
>  can be a major challenge :-). 
If it were easy there wouldn't be any point in this discussion (er ...),
but my point was that *in broad terms* a good programmer will take the
trouble and a poor one won't bother.

>  But I will say that developers who don't even make the slightest
>  attempt to document their work are saying (to me anyway): "We
>  don't want anyone to use this, that's why we keep it a secret." 
Agreed.

poc

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[John Summerfield]

Seth Vidal wrote:
>  
>  
>  On Fri, 22 May 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:
>  
> > On Fri, 22 May 2009 10:12:57 -0400 (EDT)
> > Seth Vidal wrote:
> >
> >> if some package you used a while back is still around and still being
> >> worked on then chances are good it has improved.
> >
> > And if it is open source, chances are good it still has no
> > documentation :-).
>  
>  And since it is open source, instead of just being snarky about it - you 
>  can actually contribute to that project and fix the lack of code.
>  
>  -sv
>   
That requires someone to actually understand what is intended, what it 
does and why it's useful.

If it works as well as Tom implies, those criteria aren't met.



-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa(a)coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa(a)coco.merseine.nu
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

You cannot reply off-list:-)

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 05/24/2009 03:20 PM, John Summerfield wrote:

>  That requires someone to actually understand what is intended, what
> it
>  does and why it's useful.
>  
>  If it works as well as Tom implies, those criteria aren't met. 
If he hasn't tried it after since it was first introduced, I don't think
his impressions are accurate. If you don't think the program is actually
useful, then there is no point in complaining about the lack of
documentation anyway.

Rahul

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 05/22/2009 07:29 PM, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
>  On 05/22/2009 09:56 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> > Since this is not part of the "default install" it should not be
> > considered
> > a blocker bug.
>  It seems to me that the fact that Fedora does not have a desktop search
>  engine included in its default install could itself be considered a
>  significant enough functionality gap to constitute a bug. 
Maybe but it doesn't seem like either Beagle or Tracker qualifies in its
current state. They are either buggy, leak memory, lack in functionality
or all of these. It is better to have mature solutions when they are
ready as default.

Rahul

Re[2]: Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Al Dunsmuir]

Hello Rahul,

Friday, May 22, 2009, 10:10:35 AM, you wrote:

>  On 05/22/2009 07:29 PM, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
> > On 05/22/2009 09:56 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> >> Since this is not part of the "default install" it should not be
> >> considered
> >> a blocker bug.
> > It seems to me that the fact that Fedora does not have a desktop search
> > engine included in its default install could itself be considered a
> > significant enough functionality gap to constitute a bug. 
>  Maybe but it doesn't seem like either Beagle or Tracker qualifies
> in its
>  current state. They are either buggy, leak memory, lack in functionality
>  or all of these. It is better to have mature solutions when they are
>  ready as default. 
>  Rahul 
I for one would prefer that these remain optional.

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 05/22/2009 01:59 PM, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
>  On 05/22/2009 09:56 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> > Since this is not part of the "default install" it should not be 
> > considered
> > a blocker bug.
>  It seems to me that the fact that Fedora does not have a desktop 
>  search engine included in its default install could itself be 
>  considered a significant enough functionality gap to constitute a bug.
>  
It's not up to QA team(s) to decide what is and what's not included in 
the default install.

You might wanna ask that question in the relevant Fedora *DE mailing 
list to find out why
they choose not to include a desktop search engine in the default install
( fedora-desktop for Gnome users fedora-kde for KDE users etc.. )

JBG

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Matej Cepl]

Jonathan Kamens, Fri, 22 May 2009 09:59:14 -0400:
>  It seems to me that the fact that Fedora does not have a desktop
> search
>  engine included in its default install could itself be considered a
>  significant enough functionality gap to constitute a bug. 
If we had one, than I guess it would be tracker, not beagle, IMHO.

Matěj

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 09:59 -0400, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
>  On 05/22/2009 09:56 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>  > Since this is not part of the "default install" it should not be 
>  > considered
>  > a blocker bug.
>  It seems to me that the fact that Fedora does not have a desktop search 
>  engine included in its default install could itself be considered a 
>  significant enough functionality gap to constitute a bug. 
> From personal experience with distributions that do this, I disagree.
Removing Beagle is one of the first things many Mandriva users do, on
installing the system.

It seems that it's just not a function many users find useful, yet.
Maybe a more comprehensive implementation like KDE's Nepomuk will do the
trick. But yeah, desktop search is not very widely used on Linux, and
Beagle not working with Thunderbird / Firefox wouldn't be considered a
blocker by many in QA or releng, I don't believe.

BTW, the correct procedure if you consider an issue to be a blocker is
simply to mark it as one - set it to block F11Blocker. If anyone
currently CCed on the bug disagrees, they will discuss it then.
Otherwise, it will stay so marked, and will be reviewed by the QA /
releng team that reviews blocker issues (which we've been doing for a
couple of weeks now) at the appropriate time. Just adding a comment to
the bug won't do the trick - there's far too many bugs for there to be
people from QA / releng following every single one, looking out for
comments that say "this should be a blocker!"
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Martin Sourada]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 12:00 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  Removing Beagle is one of the first things many Mandriva users do,
> on
>  installing the system.
>   
And the first thing I would do, had it been installed on Fedora...

>  It seems that it's just not a function many users find useful,
> yet.
>  Maybe a more comprehensive implementation like KDE's Nepomuk will do the
>  trick. But yeah, desktop search is not very widely used on Linux, and
>  Beagle not working with Thunderbird / Firefox wouldn't be considered a
>  blocker by many in QA or releng, I don't believe.
>   
Hm... While I can see some usecase for many users and desktop search, I
myself hadn't used desktop search for years (and, it is probably just a
lack of imagination, I cannot imagine what would desktop search be
supposed to do in web browser)... Good and clean directory structure
seems faster to me (although out of question for most people I know)
than search functionality unless batch removing files, for which the
combination of 'rm' and 'find' is the IMHO best solution. Hm... but come
to think of it, I sometimes use integrated search in mc, but usually
when I need to search specific content...

Unless beagle, or rather tracker, works in a way that if I don't
explicitly use it, I don't notice it, I would rather not have it
installed by default.

Martin

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 19:46 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:

>  myself hadn't used desktop search for years (and, it is probably
> just a
>  lack of imagination, I cannot imagine what would desktop search be
>  supposed to do in web browser)... Good and clean directory structure 
Actually, I use it all the time these days - you just don't need Beagle
to do it :). The Awesomebar does it (I used to hate the Awesomebar, but
I've grown to love it). If I vaguely remember the rough title of a blog
post I read five days ago and can't find any more, I can just type
random words from it into the awesomebar until I hit the right ones and
it shows up. Basically you can just sort of remember something you read
in Firefox a while back, type in some key words, and the awesomebar will
probably find what you were looking for. I love it, it's great. Yeah, I
could maintain a meticulously pruned bookmark tree like we all did in
1996, but I'm fricking lazy. This works better :)

>  seems faster to me (although out of question for most people I know)
In principle desktop search can do stuff you can't really do with a
directory structure, or at least not easily. For instance, what if you
organize your documents by date, but suddenly you'd like to just look up
all the ones which mention bananas? A good desktop search system lets
you do that. It's really hard to organize your documents into folders in
a way which lets you quickly isolate a set by _all_ criteria you might
want to. It is a legitimate idea, it just hasn't been really well
implemented yet, although Beagle does get close and it's good enough for
quite a lot of people already.

More extensive systems like Nepomuk will have even more interesting
capabilities, when they're done. Nepomuk could be really awesome if it
gets done properly. But for now, I don't think on a practical level we
can consider Beagle a "it's so important it must work" component.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

Shouldn't the fact that beagle doesn't work with both firefox and thunderbird be a release blocker?

[Martin Sourada]

On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 11:13 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  In principle desktop search can do stuff you can't really do with
> a
>  directory structure, or at least not easily. For instance, what if you
>  organize your documents by date, but suddenly you'd like to just look up
>  all the ones which mention bananas? A good desktop search system lets
>  you do that. It's really hard to organize your documents into folders in
>  a way which lets you quickly isolate a set by _all_ criteria you might
>  want to. It is a legitimate idea, it just hasn't been really well
>  implemented yet, although Beagle does get close and it's good enough for
>  quite a lot of people already. 
Well, I have a nice tree-like hierarchy of folders,
sorted by content,
sometimes even symlinked and finding what I want is usually a matter of
few mouse-clicks (partly thanks to my clever bookmark structure). In web
browser I use the much-more-than-just-a-location-bar in midori that lets
me enter page names or just parts of URIs and finds the rest for me (and
sometimes I just let google or wikipedia, through the same bar, find it
for me), history and bookmarks included. I wouldn't want my web history
to be cached in a way that I'd be able to search in the actual page
content...

>  
>  More extensive systems like Nepomuk will have even more interesting
>  capabilities, when they're done. Nepomuk could be really awesome if it
>  gets done properly. But for now, I don't think on a practical level we
>  can consider Beagle a "it's so important it must work" component. 
It
would be in that stage if we decide to install by default, IMHO. And
for that it must totally work for the likes of me in a way that it does
not get in my way.

Martin

[drago01]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Jonathan Kamens
<jik(a)kamens.brookline.ma.us&gt; wrote:
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477639 
I just fixed it, feel free to test the fix ;)

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1370775