Wout Clymans has kept wearing his Hero Hat over the past year, developing his own branch of Specto and enduring the pain I must have been (as a Quality Assurance freak and project manager).
Well, I can say for certain that his branch is pretty much rock-solid now, as I have been using it exclusively for the past few months without problems, and that it will become Specto 0.3.
Bazaar Woes
Therefore, after months (no kidding) of trying to stitch the mess that we had made with our version control systems (cvs, to svn, to bazaar, without keeping the history between each! for some reason Wout branched specto-woutc off from nothing initially, and it has gone by unnoticed for months, then it was too late), it has finally come to this:
“History be damned, let’s make a bzr branch out of specto-svn and merge everything Wout did over the entire year as one single, gigantic commit.”
Not elegant by any stretch of the imagination. Here’s a hint to bazaar developers: for crap’s sake, if your bazaar rebase/replay plugins can’t handle situations like this because they only care about file IDs and don’t give a rat ass about filenames, you have epic failed. It completely defeats the purpose of the darn thing.
So here’s today’s lesson, kids: make sure to preserve history, because Bazaar’s plugins can’t do anything to pull you out of that crap unless you’re a kernel developer guru it seems.
The near future
Specto 0.3 is way overdue (in my mental agenda). I am somewhat ashamed to say that I haven’t touched a single line of code in the past year, all the great work was done by Wout. Actually I did write exactly one line of code, it’s a patch sitting in my Frontbringer stuff to fix issue #1. I will apply it to specto-main soonish, hopefully.
Specto-woutc has been mostly ready for months, but the clusterfuck (as LinuxHater likes to say) that was our bazaar branches kept me unmotivated to do anything until it was solved. So that was one reason why I was not involved much except as a management and support role (bug triaging, QA testing on Wout’s branch, etc), the other two reasons being that Specto has now reached its initial role (it fulfills my daily needs) and that university keeps me way too busy.
Enough blah blah, what now? Well, since this bazaar mess is cleaned, I will feel a bit more confident in doing commits or branching. So what I plan to do is:
- check for last minute regressions in the user interface experience compared to the 0.2.x series
- search for any strings in the code that could be translated but are not yet marked as translatable
- update the translation template
- translate into French (as a benchmark)
- email all previous translators requesting help and testing
- maybe publish a 0.3-beta or release candidate? Anyone knows if some folks would be interested in testing it thoroughly?
Anyone is welcome to give feedback on the new specto-main branch.
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Comments
2 responses to “Specto 0.3 nearing completion, Bazaar branches rant”
bug triaging may be a hard work sometimes 😉
7. asking for specto 0.3 inclusion in ubuntu intrepid
Thank you for your nice comments about me 🙂
And i must say that it was very nice to work with you!
You made me understand and see things in the UI and general functions of specto that i never thought about myself.
Let’s hope we can release v 0.3 soon and continue this corporation in the future (hopefully we both will have the time to do so 🙂