[Qgis-developer] Rethinking the testing and release procedure of QGIS

[Paolo Cavallini]

Il 30/06/2011 21:55, Andreas Neumann ha scritto:

> Maybe the establishment of a testing infrastructure, as proposed by Strk
> and others, would also help to maintain/raise the quality.

Agreed: AFAICT this is a major task: any idea of how much work would be necessary for
reasonable results? An order of magnitude would be enough for now.

> 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.

I would second this, but would not be surprised if we end up raising little money
from it. It is true that 1 € per user per year would be enough for us, but I doubt
that more than a tiny fraction of users will feel like.
If I'm wrong, I'm more than happy. Another possibility is to make a special fund
raising appeal for this. Similar initiatives for other projects had some success,
apparently.
My personal view is that we should expect more from the growing number of larger
institutions and enterprises that are using QGIS as a crucial piece of their
infrastructure. Some of them already realized the benefits of contributing back to
the well-being of the project, but many (most) still uses it and do not contribute.
They have the power to improve this situation easily.
All the best.
-- 
Paolo Cavallini: http://www.faunalia.it/pc