Hello Bernhard, First I'd like to make clear it is not a criticism per si, but a constructive critic.
On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Bernhard Miklautz <bmikla...@thinstuff.at> wrote: > as Marc-Andre already said we are short on time and man power. > Since the last release a lot of new features and clients where added, > the code base and functionality is growing. > > One really big and hard problem we face is the complexity of RDP. It > ain't an easy job to test all features. Think about it - we support a > couple of architectures and operating systems on the client side > (windows, linux, mac, i386, amd64) and there are a lot of different > windows version to test. To setup, prepare and keep a proper test > environment running is also a big, time consuming, task. I fully agree; so it seems it is the time to stop accepting new features and clean up the current ones. If we keep adding more and more code on top of it, it makes it harder and harder to stabilize. > On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 09:54:26AM -0200, Otavio Salvador wrote: >> Personally I've been having a lot of issues with FreeRDP with features >> not working file (serial redirection, smart card redirection and so >> on) which worked fine in 0.9 (yes, the GPL released one) and this has >> been a blocking issue for me. > I personally haven't used 0.9 (jumped the train later on ;) so I don't > know how good things where with 0.9. Are there any specifc issues you > are refering too? > > For smart card there is ongoing work: > > https://github.com/akallabeth/FreeRDP.git branch smartcard_context_fix > > It contains a lot of fixes and improvements (that will also go into 1.1 > once merged). Serial should work - at least the tests I do work. In my point of view, this should be a priority as this is a constant source of problems and the better we have it, more users we'll get. >> What are the plans regarding 1.1? 1.2? >> >> I'd prefer a less feature-rich release but a more reliable one than >> that many non-finished "next big thing but never done" releases. > Totally agree with you, better a reliable and working release then half > working > things or nothing at all. Thats why we recently created stable-1.1 it's aimed > to be the > next stable release. We are trying to keep to keep the API stable and > only merge back bug fixes and performance enhancements from master and > fix issues. > > For 1.1 the plan is to get it out as soon as we can ;). We don't have > an fixed schedule - basically we will release when we've > managed to resolve all open issues assigned to 1.1 (currently 136) and > try to do betas on a regular base. Once again; I'd freeze master and be strict about accepting new code. FreeRDP is quite active but the flux of code is adding more and more features. It is not doing it right as it brings a lot of regressions. When I were more active to FreeRDP I once proposed we use branches for stabilization of work and merge them on master just after it has no known issues. It never happened... > Since we haven't released for a while most distributions contain an > rather old version of FreeRDP which makes it also hard for people to > user newer versions and help us test - they would need to build it > themselves. Therefore we are currently also work nightly package builds > for the most widespread distributions. Also have a look on > https://ci.freerdp.com (if you haven't seen it already). Yes and people will be more and more afraid of update; it won't be an upgrade but a different product and radically change its use. This is the optimal way of making Free Software in my opinion. As well covered by Eric S. Raymond, in his Cathedral and the Bazaar book: Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. > If someone wants to help: > > * Do Test and file issues > (https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/wiki/BugReporting) > * Fix issues (https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/issues) > * Help us with documentation > * Support us with test environments we can test against > * Help us to improve our tests and testing infrastructure > > So a lot of good things are going on... and I'm personally not really > concerned about the future of FreeRDP - If we stay a small "army" things > take longer but will happen at some point. My fear is that 'some point' may be too late... Regards, -- Otavio Salvador O.S. Systems http://www.ossystems.com.br http://code.ossystems.com.br Mobile: +55 (53) 9981-7854 Mobile: +1 (347) 903-9750 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135991&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freerdp-devel mailing list Freerdp-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freerdp-devel
