[IAEP] Announce: OLPC software strategy.

[Martin Langhoff]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 10:08 PM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> You're asking me to rejustify decisions made in November 2009 when the
> environment was somewhat different.

I understand the situation was weird in Nov 2009. But that's behind
us, and I'd say we got to make good use of the tools we have...

> We had informal unpublished plans to release but we had no release name
> chosen.

That's fine, we can always use a tentative milestone name.

> The change I made months ago was to facilitate testers and bug reporters
> ... to increase the data quality by removing the version numbers from a
> popup list, and encouraging use of the keywords field.
...
> The naming scheme was chosen because people had been logging tickets
> using the milestone as a version field.

Hmm, I understood the *other* reasons, but I don't buy that one. Of
course, users should use the 'version' field for that. But they cannot
possibly use the milestone field (if milestones are well managed)
because they cannot be running something that has not been released
yet :-)

> Trac allows any use of the milestone field;

And guns can be aimed in various directions. Sure.

> in software project
> management one does not always map a milestone to a release name.
> Conflating the two was causing confusion.

Of course. But reusing the same milestone name is recipe for confusion.

> I wanted to be rid of the old milestone values too, but the argument
> against that was that the old data was harmless and occasionally useful.

NO. Please, not kidding, I really mean this: It is a key usage of trac
(and any other useful bugtracker) to query for the 'changelog' as
"tasks/bugs closed in release X'.

Yes, the written release notes are nicer, but they gloss over a ton of things.

Key question: How do we query 'tickets closed in 10.1.0'? How about in 10.1.1?

cheers,



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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