I'm happy this subject is getting such a large attention. I include the users lists in my message as this thread is most interesting for users (actually, this is a users question rather than a developers question).
First of all, I want to stress that nothing I've said implies that I do not think "that developers know about their responsibility". That's not the problem. I also think that many errors are fixed very quickly, and if this were not the case, I would not complain: I would just not use QGIS. My concern is not that QGIS has many bugs, but that users do not have a clear list of the most important current problems they can find if they use a given version of QGIS. This is why I think we need to create a team of committed users that would maintain a page with the most important operational problems (and I obviously show up for becoming a member of that team). The proposed list is not going to be very useful for developers, who already have the "issues" system to which some of us (users) try to contribute. But is very important for users to know the limits within which they can safely operate. The problems I had with the Join or with the georeferencing were not worrying on their own: both problems could be easily circumvented. The problem is the loss of confidence because the user thinks: "what other errors am I going to find next?" or even worse: "might it be that the processing I've done up to now was wrong?" As I said, QGIS is good, thus highlighting the most important problems (according to the experience of users) is actually reassuring. A second question relates to the popular comment "you cannot expect people to work for you all the time for free". Users reporting errors work for free also, in the sense that developers do not pay them. And, in OS, the rule is that most users do not pay developers (and the reverse), which does not mean that developers or users work for free. In the case of R, many universities, research centers and hospitals provide funding, mainly in the form of having permanent technicians working on R development as a part of their job. But this happened once R reached stability and universities started to save on commercial licenses. I think that the funding problem with QGIS is that it has not been adopted yet by any university as its main GIS. And I think the problem is that, at the moment, QGIS is still seen as too buggy. A second reason is that many users do not see any real advantage because the university provides campus licenses. Well, in that case, QGIS must offer features that other programs do not. And I personally find that a big one is the link to other platforms such as Grass, Saga, OTB and R. Agus 2011/12/19 Ivan Mincik <[email protected]>: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > The problem with testers could be that people could not have access to > all supported platforms (for example I am able to test something only in > Debian Squeeze). Most of testers do not have Macs, so it could be a > problem to say that I will guarantee that this or that feature is OK, > because I did test only for my platforms. So again, I am returning back > with the question on test suite. > > By the way what are the Linux supported platforms (at least which Ubuntu > versions)? > > > At least, Big thanks to all devs for backporting fixes to maintenance > releases. > > - -- > Ivan Mincik, Gista s.r.o. > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) > > iEYEARECAAYFAk7vFvcACgkQVqso/9cUsCwxKACgxrJ3oLXdxikntRuQzut0c3h0 > Z8oAn0iyA+XhLWGClkolPTL/qMds8M+s > =mzSF > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > _______________________________________________ > Qgis-developer mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
