[Portland] Preparing for first beta....

[Bastian, Waldo]

Dear list,

In preparation of the first beta as well as in order to coordinate the
QA test suite development, Bryce Harrington, Tom Whipple and myself had
a small hack session together this Tuesday afternoon. Here is a quick
summary of the issues that were discussed/what we agreed upon. Please
speak up if you think we may have missed something or otherwise made
unwise choices.

Testing
=======
* Tom will add the test plan (ODF, PDF) to CVS once he has incorporated
the latest feedback, the PDF version will be linked from the Portland
wiki
* It would be nice to have a form on a website to report test-results.
Once reported on this website, test-results should be fed into
Portland's bugzilla.
* A tool should be provided to easily collect relevant information about
the tested system. The resulting information should be included in the
test-results. Relevant information includes "distro brand & version",
/etc/lsb-release, X server version, version info from kde-config, kmail,
kdesktop, gedit, nautilus, evolution, firefox and mozilla. Bryce will
look into this.

Beta1 Release
=============
* Beta1 planned for end of week / begin next week
* --help output should go to stdout, error messages should go to stderr.
* All error messages should follow a format similar to:
	"xdg-tool: Error, problem description 'faulty argument'"
* Command line syntax errors should be followed by
	"Try 'xdg-tool --help' for more information."
Instead of the actual help text itself. (See e.g. the 'df' tool)
* --help should not show examples, only the synopsis and a reference to
the new --man option (and possibly a pointer to the documentation on
portland.freedesktop.org)
* A --man option should be added that displays the entire manual page,
as embedded in the script itself. The rationale for this is that we
encourage
developers to include the scripts along with applications and we do not
expect any man pages to be installed in such case.
* Two release tarballs should be made available. One tarball should
include scripts, documentation, manpages and test suite. The other
tarball should only include the scripts themselves. 
* xdg-screensaver should implement "suspend screensaver until resumed"
instead of "suspend for a certain amount of time". To prevent the
screensaver from being suspended indefinitly when an application
crashes, the suspension should be tied to the existence of a specified X
Window. Applications must pass the window ID of this X Window to
xdg-screensaver. Xdg-screensaver can use "xprop -id <WindowID> -spy" to
track the existence of the specified X Window. Systems without xprop
command (if such systems exist) should offer degraded service and not
track the existence of the specified X window, but otherwise work the
same.
* xdg-screensaver should be able to keep track of multiple suspensions
in parallel based on the WindowID. A file should be used to keep track
of all pending suspensions. When updating this file, race conditions
must be prevented through the use of a lockfile. Xdg-screensaver can use
the "lockfile" command to create lockfiles without race conditions.
Systems without "lockfile" command (if such systems exist) should offer
degraded service and not use a lockfile at the risk of being prone to
race conditions, but otherwise work the same.

Other TODO items
================
Not discussed, but on my Must-Fix list for Beta1:
* Resolve BR7136
* xdg-icon: Install .icon file as well, when present (as per man page)
* xdg-icon: Create additional link to gnome-mime-<major>-<minor> for
mime icons (Required for gnome 2.10, likely for other versions as well)
* xdg-icon: KDE doesn't honour XDG_DATA_* for icons, create additional
link if $xdg-dir is not part of KDE icon lookup path. (kde-config --path
icon)
(See http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97776)
* Add examples to man pages (xdg-desktop / xdg-icon)
* When expecting a file, interpret --foo as an unknown option, not as a
non existing file. This way error messages make way more sense.

Not discussed, but useful (Beta2?):
* Add support for -v: Print debug information to assist trouble shooting

Waldo Bastian
Linux Client Architect - Client Linux Foundation Technology
Channel Platform Solutions Group
Intel Corporation - http://www.intel.com/go/linux
OSDL DTL Tech Board Chairman