-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all,
Please regard my email as constructive criticism. This is as much a criticism of the users (including myself) as it is on the developers. It is my impression that the users are not testing QGIS trunk enough before the release, but they complain after the release. I am having serious concerns with the quality of the final QGIS 1.7 release as it currently stands. I have to say that I am usually using trunk. The trunk version, it seems to me, has fewer issues than the release versions. Also it seems, that the self-compiled trunk version works fine, but the Ubuntu packages may have problems. Then there are the PDF/printing issues on Windows ... which are major problems to many people. I think we should, in the future, first release a beta-version and test it for a couple of days/weeks before we call it a final release. Also, we should do - much more - testing. Testing is the task of the power users, not so much the developers. And we need testers, not only on Linux, but also on Windows and Mac. While many devs are on Linux, the majority of the QGIS users work on Windows. Maybe the establishment of a testing infrastructure, as proposed by Strk and others, would also help to maintain/raise the quality. Another idea is to collect money (something like a membership fee (voluntary, but expected from users who use QGIS a lot)) and pay QA people. With the fast growing QGIS user base it should be possible to collect enough money for such a task. It is my impression that the current state of the 1.7 version with all the major issues hurts the reputation of QGIS. We need to act and make sure that this does not happen again. The QGIS team has to become more professional if it wants to grow its user base and doesn't want to loose their users. This includes boring tasks, such as QA. Any thoughts? Andreas -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJODNSaAAoJELiCsGDopvBCT+0IAIOYTjIAETPIa5Amu4Oa1yP5 jM3HGSsqPpFVSWnFVuFAgLbziiMBJ8O+u6ucsTvoZWnxiHNLs5b+t5NIfDdtTulo TLOFCVQDVtv5mOBe7CJpVpj9POToP+VpAZqeg5ni4OZ28JbQzWLyV6u9AJCUFwnq k3gcClZ2FWw31la7ABcTc8LT+JJv7zpQCJ7M3O5apatSg54xiVQSxIb5mlzNOtwg 9JYsdMRHvxm2UB+6HXgIJ8BPhh6OTR5OWFOturwFeoTBPXdsUrRlkClZSgdNrTQy 3azBy/XcnkVVvo4r9EMfD4N3fQeENp/PzVKEGlP+pd6+4y8GWvZ63ZZr+4PvDvY= =VoH6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Qgis-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
