Yes, it's that time again - tomorrow is Presto Test Day. Presto is the planned Fedora 11 feature which uses deltarpms (essentially packages which contain only the changes since the previous version of the package, not the whole data, to reduce size and increase transfer speed) for updates. Obviously we need to make sure this works reliably before we could include it in Fedora 11. It would be a big benefit for those on slow or capped internet connections, so please come by to help test it out! Unfortunately, you need an installed system to test: we can't test package management tools from a live CD. An installation of the Beta release is fine, though. The Test Day takes place all day on the #fedora-qa IRC channel - see How to use IRC if you're not familiar with IRC.

Following up my earlier post, the python-bugzilla was fixed, so here's the Intel numbers: 20 bugs were reported as a result of the test day. As of now, 13 (65%) are in ASSIGNED state, 6 (30%) are in NEW state, and 1 (5%) is in CLOSED state, with the resolution DUPLICATE. So rather lower than the numbers for nouveau and radeon, and no fixed bugs yet. Actually, it suggests another metric: bug reports per tester. So, let's see...nouveau had 102 testers, intel had 23, and radeon had 55. So we had 0.39 unique-bugs-per-tester for nouveau, 0.87 for intel, and 0.84 for radeon. Which is interesting - it rather suggests people experienced substantially fewer issues with nouveau than with intel or radeon, which may not have been expected. Of course, intel and radeon support 3D acceleration while nouveau does not, which could account for some of the difference. nouveau also had a rather smaller and easier set of tests than radeon - it didn't have the tricky rotation or suspend test cases. Here's the raw data, for anyone interested: Intel Radeon Nouveau They're in a simple CSV format - you can load it into OO.o Calc as a CSV and it should work.

Well, if you can read this, I can blog from my phone. Yes, I'm an inveterate twiddler. John Carr just landed a patch in synce which Pawel Kot wrote months ago, and Mandriva's been carrying since then. It fixes a problem where a contact being sync'ed to the synce opensync plugin which has a phone number without the Voice type explicitly set wouldn't show up. This broke at least sync from the gnokii plugin to synce. Now mdv doesn't have to carry the patch in future and it'll be easier to get into Fedora. thanks john!

Well, first of all, those of you who've noticed the schedule around here may be wondering why I'm not advertising this week's Test Day. That would be because it's on UEFI, a technology that's basically only available to motherboard manufacturer's or companies with access to motherboard manufacturers' advance hardware test programs, so the only people who can contribute to this test day are really folks working for Red Hat or motherboard manufacturers - and all of those already know about it. So, that's that. :) Secondly, I was asked by James Laska if I could come up with some metrics for the video driver triage days we've run for Fedora 11. After an absorbing hour or two whacking at the data set by grepping through the test day wiki pages for bug IDs, feeding them into python-bugzilla and then sorting the result via OpenOffice.org (why yes, I AM a fan of Heath Robinson...oh, and of course, I use nedit for its awesome ability to do rectangular selections), here we go for the Nouveau and Radeon test days. Unfortunately I can't get data for Intel yet because of a bug in python-bugzilla, but once Will's fixed that, I shall. So! To start with Nouveau: 40 bugs were reported as a result of the test day. As of now, 14 (35%) are in ASSIGNED state, 10 (25%) are in NEW state, and 16 (40%) are in CLOSED state. Of the CLOSED bugs, 4 were closed as DUPLICATE, 2 were closed as NOTABUG, and the other 10 were closed as RAWHIDE (i.e. fixed). And, Radeon: 46 bugs were reported as a result of the test day. As of now, 26 (57%) are in ASSIGNED state, 14 (30%) are in NEW state, and 6 (13%) are in CLOSED state. Of the CLOSED bugs, 5 were closed as DUPLICATE, and one was closed as RAWHIDE (i.e. fixed). So the Nouveau test day has already been pretty successful: just two weeks after it happened, it's already resulted in ten fixed bugs. Radeon test day has only resulted in one fixed bug so far, but plenty of valid reports which should hopefully be addressed as work continues on the driver. Also, a quarter or so of the bugs filed haven't yet been triaged (that's the difference between NEW and ASSIGNED), so Matej, François and myself should get those done. Intel data coming as soon as the python-bugzilla bug's fixed!

So today was another day of poking at my shiny stuff. I re-flashed my phone with the awesome Titan Reloaded ROM, which is a tweaked and optimized Windows Mobile 6.1 build with the HTC TouchFlo interface that showed up in later models. I also upgraded the radio firmware and installed WmWifiRouter, which makes a Windows Mobile phone act as a wireless router, sharing its data connection. Which is pretty freaking awesome, and a nice easy platform- and device-independent way to do tethering. Of course it eats battery on the phone, but still, it's pretty damn cool. I'm using it now. The upgrades also enabled the GPS functionality built into the Titan but not enabled in the stock OS (or the firmware/radio I was using before).

Again makes me appreciate how useful it is that the Windows Mobile platform and HTC hardware are pretty open and tweakable; some of this stuff you can't even do on Android yet, even though it's supposedly so open, because no-one's figured out how to talk to the radios at a sufficiently low level. Titan Reloaded is also just an impressive piece of work, it makes it feel almost like a new phone.

So Carolina and the Canucks have both clinched playoff spots - if that turns out to be the Stanley Cup final it could get me fired ;)

So the Radeon test day is happening now and has been a great success - many testers present and useful bugs filed. Dave Airlie was online earlier and should be online again in a couple of hours, so we're still rocking, but thanks to everyone who's come out so far! Also a big thanks to François Cami, who will handle triaging of the reports filed.

There is another test day tomorrow (Thursday), our regular scheduled one: this is on power management. It has been expertly organized by James Laska and the power management developers, and looks great: as with all recent test days, there's a live CD image available and a set of simple, well-defined test cases to carry out. If you're at all interested in power management - and if you own a laptop, you should be - please swing by the Test Day tomorrow (#fedora-qa in IRC, as always - see this page if you're not sure how to use IRC), and post your results to the page!

This is pure gold. (Ironically, I note that this post could have been a tweet...)

Every release, the dedicated volunteers in the Documentation team produce the Fedora Installation Guide, an exhaustive and detailed guide to installing Fedora. For Fedora 11, they have asked us in the QA team to co-ordinate 'testing' of the Installation Guide. By doing installations following the instructions in the Installation Guide, we can find issues in both the Guide and the installation process itself, and thus improve both.

So, I have written up an installation guide 'Test Case'.

As you can see, essentially what we'd like you to do is to take a look at the Fedora 11 Installation Guide as it currently stands, and try installing either Fedora 11 Beta or current Rawhide according to the instructions found in the Installation Guide. Report any problems you find - any bugs in the installer itself, or errors or missing information or bits where what's written in the guide doesn't correspond to what you see in the actual installer - to Bugzilla.

As this is a wide-ranging case which doesn't involve any particular component or developer, we aren't running a Test Day for this, but instead would like it to be an ongoing process throughout the rest of the Fedora 11 release cycle. Please, if you have the spare time and resources, try and take part in this testing! Please discuss any questions, problems or issues in the forum thread. Thanks!

So we had a wonderfully successful Nouveau test day on Thursday. The turnout was great and we got really high-quality feedback, which is already allowing Ben to fix several bugs in Rawhide updates. A huge thanks to everyone who came out and helped test. Remember, if you couldn't make it to the test day, you can still do the testing and report your results following the instructions on the Wiki page. This week's regular Thursday test day is on power management, but we are also again having a special off-schedule test day. This one will be on Wednesday April 1st (yes, really!), and is on the radeon driver. This isn't a new driver like nouveau, but it has seen substantial changes since Fedora 10 - especially in the 3D layer. It also supports a wide range of very different cards, from the ancient to the brand new, so we need broad-based testing to see where it stands across as much of the range as possible. Just like the Nouveau test day there will be a live CD to make testing easy, and the test cases are simple to follow and carry out, so if you have an ATI graphics adapter, please come along to help with testing! To post a quick update on other things I've been working on lately - as discussed on -devel-list, I've been working with the opensync maintainer, Andreas Bierfert, to get Fedora's opensync package stack into shape. Well, mostly, I've been telling him what he ought to do and he's been doing all the actual work! We now have the 0.22 package set in Rawhide, which is a good start. There's still a few more tweaks that would be useful. Concomitant to that, I've also been poking at NetworkManager's behaviour with regards to Windows Mobile devices, with the invaluable assistance of the super-awesome Dan Williams. I went after a few red herrings, but in the end we've determined that NetworkManager can handle Windows Mobile devices connected via USB in internet connection sharing mode perfectly correctly, but should butt out and ignore Windows Mobile devices connected via USB in synchronization mode entirely, and let the scripts in synce-hal handle them. synce-hal should be doing the exact opposite - handling devices in synchronization mode and ignoring ones in ICS mode. The synce developers are aware of this now, so hopefully future versions of NM and synce will work harmoniously together and you won't need to work around them to do what you need to do. That just leaves Bluetooth to sort out...