[Qgis-developer] Is the new release schedule a success?

[Tom Chadwin]

If the answer is that there is no way that the 2.8.0 and 2.10.0 bugs would
ever have come to light before release, then sure, I accept the argument.
However, Nyall says that one of the bugs was apparent as a test failure.
Perhaps the best thing to do would have been to acknowledge that the flood
of test failures (mostly false negatives) needed to be addressed before the
release, and so the release should have been postponed.

While I mean what I said about our organization's use of QGIS
(Northumberland National Park Authority), other partner organizations (the
other UK National Park Authorities) are often less enthusiastic about what
they see as a risky migration to FOSS. My main point in raising this is that
the immediate requirements for patching .0 releases adds to this reluctance.

I would also disagree that FOSS users expect this. That used to be true when
FOSS users were all enthusiastic hobbyists or devs. QGIS is a million miles
beyond that, and is rightly challenging proprietary GISes in corporate
environments. While I might ask our GIS officer to use the nightly build and
report bugs, it's not his core job, nor other professional GIS officers'. He
would struggle to find the time. Also, neither he nor I are developers, so
there is an intimidating learning curve even in bug reporting and testing.

My original thought was that perhaps a better release roadmap would be
functionality-based rather than calendar-based - in other words, decide what
the dev priorities are, and release only when agreed milestones are reached.
Of course, the user base should be given indicative timescales, but the
deadlines should never trump QA.

Once again, of course I accept and understand that there are so few devs and
testers compared to the user base. My point is that that is a block to the
growth of the software which should be discussed, and therefore should not
simply be accepted as a given.

Thanks again, everyone. I'm only raising because I believe that adoption of
QGIS might suffer because of it.



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