PCF Testing

Will posted release candidate 2 for miro 2.5 last night.

• windows
• os x
• source

There were some final database changes to handle some potential issues when disks filled and a few tweaks to to vlc on windows to account for non-ascii named directories.

Please give us a hand with a final round of testing before we release.

The first release candidate build for Miro 2.5 has been posted:

• windows
• os x
• source

I’ve been testing them on windows and os x, and they are looking very solid.  It would be great if a few more people could run some of the regression tests, as the lightening destroyed my machine that had linux and windows XP.  Also – I don’t have a machine with os x 10.5 (only 10.4.11).

Also – for windows users, it appears that the update to vlc 1.0 has fixed bug #11300 a pretty annoying problem where windows would report an error on shutdown.

Finally, please report any issues on bugzilla, get satisfaction, or just comment here.

We are about to start looking for more help testing the nightly builds for 2.5-svn and I wanted to give a few more details about things that have changed and areas to focus on with the testing.

The most obvious change is the reorganization of the Library.  Instead of Library, New and Individual Downloads, you will now be presented with Video, Audio, Other and Downloading.

The video and audio main view has filters for All, Unwatched and Non-feed items to make it easier to find your downloaded shows.

There are also significant changes to the audio playback ui.  Audio playback no longer displays a blank window.  Instead the interface remains active and the progress bar on the chrome displays the playing file.

Speed and the database changes

Both Ben and Will and Nicholas have mentioned this in past posts.  Ben redid the way the database is loaded and stored.  He’s given us some solid startup speed improvements.  He has also mostly given up on pickles, so in general the items are plain and readable.  If you are a db junkie, you can finally see inside to the data guts of miro.

Because of the big database changes, we have finally started backing up the old database prior to any upgrades.  This should make you feel a bit more secure about testing nightly builds because it’s a lot easier to go back without data loss.

The Database Backup page has been updated to give instructions on where and how to find the database and return to an earlier version if necessary.

Recently I read the post woman and mozilla, concerning the contributions of women in the FLOSS world.  It set me thinking about  differences between contributions of men vs woman to miro testing.

From observations of the bug list and regression tests,  I’d say that we have a greater percentage of men who regularly download nightly builds and provide feedback in the form of bug reports.  However, from litmus, I can see that people who more regularly run the regression test cases are woman.

We should bust the stereotypes that woman are less assertive men won’t follow the instructions.  We’re gearing up for another round of testing pretty soon, so when the call comes to help:

• Men: read the directions!
• Woman: write some bugs!

One aspect of testing Miro has just gotten a lot more fun!

Yesterday Paul released and update to the Miro Guide. A portion of the testing of the guide updates was accomplished using a few automated test suites driven by Selenium Core.  We chose to use selenium core because we wanted to integrate with our existing test case management tool, litmus as well as allow everyone to be able to participate in the testing.

This testing is for the miro test channel guide, which is where the development takes place before updating to the live guide.  It would be great to get more volunteers and a greater variety of browsers tested.  If you just want to give it a spin, you can open the test suites directly in your browser of choice:

• FrontPageNav: checks the basic links and layout of the guides main page.
• Register User Actions:logs into a test account verifies some of the actions of a logged in user.
• Submit Feed: error checking of the submit feed form.

There are a few more test suites, and if you want to participate in guide testing, the best thing to do is to go to Litmus select the testchannelguide2.parti… test run, enter your configuration, select the selenium (automated) test group and follow the very simple instructions.  Testing via litmus will allow us to track the tests run, errors and browser used.

It would be great to get some feedback from others familiar with using selenium.  If you would like to get involved in the test creation process, here is a page with much more details about miro guide testing with selenium.

Update:

I updated the links below to point to the 2009-03-05 nightly builds which contain updated translations.  Thanks to everyone who has contributed via Launchpad.

After numerous non-ascii character induced headaches – we have a set of nightly builds posted that we believe are worthy of being called 2.0.2.

This is a bug-fix update for 2.0.1 that also contains additional search engines like 5min.com, metavid.org, Everyzing.com, and returns DailyMotion to the list.  It also contains an updated version of libtorrent and it has some Windows startup fixes.

Please give us a hand testing these builds: windows, os x, source.  You own exploratory testing leading to some good bug reports is appreciated as well as any regression testing via litmus.

Here is is the list of bug fixes from the Release Notes (draft):

Bug Fixes:

• #11385 support for both libtorrent 0.13 and 0.14
• #11413 single quote and double quote translation into Miro 2.0
• #11423 Delete unused icon cache files
• #11430 ValueError: Multiple default guides!
• #11432 EOFError loading config
• #11456 FIXED ‘Show More’ crashes with UnicodeDecodeError
• #11460 Non-UTF8 locales break things
• #11477 Miro shows no videos in a specific invalid feed
• #11478 TypeError: NoneType object is unsubscriptable
• #11479 AttributeError: ‘AppController’ object has no attribute ‘pausedDownloaders’
• #11474 Can’t process cookie expiration. Thanks Uwe!
• #11022 “File name:” string is bold. Thanks Zach!
• #11245 OPML import/export issues with non-ascii filenames
• #11525 migrating folders with non-ascii characters
• #11527 watched directories with non-ascii characters
• #11528 playback fails for items in directories with non-ascii characters
• #11544 handling for site type in subscriptions
• #11546 pause all does not pause queued downloads
• #11435 re-worked xine driver code so that it respects xine-driver property
• #11522 error loading windll.winhttp
• #11539 OSX crash when migrating to directory with non-ascii characters
• #11557 non-ascii directory names are not displayed properly in Folder panel of preferences
• #11575 non-ascii movies dir – startup check dir name mangled
• #11435 miro should obey .xine/config
• #11522 Error loading windll.winhttp
• #11546 Pause All does not pause queued downloads
• #11554 first time startup search, non-ascii directory
• #11560 crash when updated torrent that is in a folder with other files
• #11568 Miro_Downloader Crashes on Launch

Updates:

• updated translations synced from LaunchPad on 2/24/2009
• #11516 Updated to libtorrent 0.14.2

New Features:

• #11518 Added metavid.org search support. Thanks Uwe!
• #11461 Added 5min.com search support. Thanks Uwe!
• #3858 Added EveryZing search support. Thanks Uwe!
• #11458 Added vimeo.com url scraping support. Thanks Uwe!

Last night Will posted the Miro 2.0-rc1 build onto the Miro nightly builds page.  I thought I would provide some information about downloads, bugs and what has changed within Miro since we had asked for more widespread testing with the January 20th build.

For the 20090120-nightly build, there have been more than 8000 downloads on os x, about 1600 on windows and 230 source downloads.

This is a huge amount of downloads for just a nightly build.  That number coupled with the actual number of serious bugs that were reported has given us a lot of confidence to move forward.  So thanks.

Bugs fixed in the last 10 days

There have been 58 bugs fixed in the last 10 days.  All but four (4) of them we considered priority 1 or 2 tickets.  There were 49 bugs opened in the past 10 days and 20 of them remain open.  However those that remain are mostly lower priority tickets.

There has been huge momentum towards getting this release finished.  The developers have been doing a fantastic job fixing the bugs as they have been reported.  We still need your continued participation to be sure that we get all critical bugs found and resolved.

So please, download and test Miro 2.0-rc1 today.  If you find any bugs, please check the 2.0 bug list for duplicates and comment there before making a new report.

So you’ve found a bug, or maybe you have an enhancement request.  You’ve taken the time to fill out the form, provide useful detailed information, log files… click Submit.  You check your email the next day and find that all your work has been returned with the simple statement:  Duplicate.

Arrgh.

You can avoid all that with a few simple search tips – which will save yourself some effort and help us track and reproduce existing bugs.

If you are running the regression test cases and you encounter what you think is a bug, the easiest way to look for a duplicate is to first check those that are associated with the test case.  Along the right side of each test case title, there is a view button.

Clicking that button will open a table containing the history of that particular test case and contain links to any bugs reported.  Clicking on the comment will display brief information the tester entered about the error.  Selecting the link in the right column will open the bug in bugzilla.

If you use firefox for your browser, then the searching is super easy once you add bugzilla to your list of search engines.  Go to the PCF instance of bugzilla.  Then, right-click in the search engine pulldown list and select Add Bugzilla.  After that – you can select bugzilla as your engine, enter some descriptive words and it will perform a quick search of only open bugs.   Usually a quick browsing this list of bugs and enhancement requests is all it takes to find the duplicate.

And lastly, what about when you get an automatic crash reporter notification that look like this:

For the 2.0 release, we have added a new diagnostics tool.  From the Miro Help menu, select Diagnostics.  This will open a window that displays essential information about Miro on your system.  Click the Show button for the Log file location.

If you browse through the log file, you will see some the exception information.  A crash report always starts with  —– CRASH REPORT (DANGER CAN HAPPEN) —–, after that we provide revision and system information.  Below that is the Exception information:

If you copy some of the unique words from the last line of the exception information, and drop it in the bugzilla search – you should be able to tell if that particular crash has been reported.  Reporting those crashes with log information is an extra step you can take that is very helpful.

What to do if your bug is already in bugzilla?  Please, add a comment to the bug with your operating system, build information and any extra information that can help the developers reproduce it.

It feels like every aspect of my digital life has recently become cleaner, clearer, fresher, better.

I just updated to Firefox 3 RC3 today.  I am so psyched to be part of their world record setting download day.  I’ve also been running Ubuntu Hardy for a few weeks now, and of course I have been testing our nightly builds of Miro.

Each project just gets better with each release.

Sometimes it hard to tell  how far you’ve come, when each change comes in small increments as opposed to big jumps.  So the other day – I downloaded Democracy 0.8.5.3 and installed it.  That was the latest version when I first joined up with PCF almost two years ago.

 Democracy Player 0.8.5.3

Passing through a plethora of database, ui, torrent client and preference changes, the update to the latest nightly was flawless.   Here is a sneak peak of what we have been working on.

2008/06/13-nightly build:  Have I ever mentioned my huge love for the dev team at PCF?

So this is where we are right now.  Want to know what’s in there?  There is a draft copy of the release notes for 1.5 that outlines the changes and bug fixes in the current branch.

We’d love to know how it works for you – so backup up your database, and help us fine tune the next level of internet video.

ok – so i lied -

We need some help testing the Miro 1.2 release candidate builds.

Last night Will posted the rc0 builds for the upcoming 1.2 release. There are some interesting bug fixes and updates included in this release as well as some serious behind the scenes changes.

Most interesting are some of the enhancements we have made to the preferences.

1. We have added the highly-requested feature to allow a global option to control channel autodownload settings.
2. Separate preferences to control manual and automatic simultaneous downloads.
3. The ability on linux to toggle between the xine and gstreamer backends.
4. A preference to set the torrent upload ratio.

There were also some big changes to fundamental parts of the application. They shouldn’t have any obvious effects but definitely require thorough testing prior to release. This includes:

1. Frontend – Backend reorganization (devs can check out Ben’s blog on this)
2. Update to VLC 0.8.6e (affecting windows)
3. Update to Perian 1.1 (affecting os x)
4. Update to XULRunner 1.9 (affecting windows)

The release notes draft contains a more complete summary of the changes.

Please lend a hand

As usual the builds are located on the nightlies page.

The tests are located in the litmus regression testing.

For more ways to help – please check out the QA wiki.