[Qgis-developer] release of 1.7

[Duarte Carreira]

As an user/adopter/envangelist I agree very much with Markus. And the suggestion from Alex is very to the point. This is not the first time (or last) open source devs face this challenge... I remember why I abandoned gvSIG... too many bugs while pursuing more and more novel features. I could make a 3D view, but couldn't edit a bigger shapefile... and releases were so far apart bugs were almost perennial.

Having too few resources to handle all open bugs/new features must be thought through... the list of bugs with a request for donations is a very good idea IMVHO. Also, having a budget estimation for each one can also encourage people to donate. Also, there was an OSGeo quiz about future efforts/directions, and support to projects was one of those concerns. Maybe there is a model somewhere to support this kind of growing up hardships...

I'm a "corporate user" and it's not easy to authorize an expense (consider also I'm in Portugal). There are mind frames, and cultural difficulties (besides lack of money)... I first need to establish QGIS in the enterprise, and later on propose spending money... not the other way around.

Duarte

-----Mensagem original-----
De: Alex Mandel [mailto:tech_dev at wildintellect.com]
Enviada: terça-feira, 31 de Maio de 2011 23:32
Para: qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
Assunto: Re: [Qgis-developer] release of 1.7

On 05/31/2011 02:07 PM, Jürgen E. Fischer wrote:
> Hi Marco,
>
> On Tue, 31. May 2011 at 16:35:19 +0200, Marco Hugentobler wrote:
>> I'm in favour of releasing 1.7 now. The release was already planned for March
>> and was shifted then. There will always be a large number of bugs in the
>> queue, even with donations. Maybe we even discover more of them in a beta
>> version :-)
>
> I'm also in favor of releasing 1.7 as is - we decided what to release when we
> branched and I don't see a reason to revert that.
>
> Moreover I believe most of the tickets tagged as "Must Fix For Release" aren't
> actually blockers - or were introduced with 1.7.  So that's probably just
> misleading.
>
>
> Jürgen
>

I think it's fine to release it as is but do think we should call it
Beta, Testing or something similar. We should also consider a doing bug
fix only release (no new features), not a backport of fixes either and
try to steer developers towards that goal for the next couple of months.
This bug fix release could be the last release of the 1.x series if it's
really stable.

In the future maybe once every X (2-3, or .5-1 a year) releases we could
do a bug fix/bug hunt release where we just take time to clean up. If
it's just a couple of months of bug hunting with very little other
changes it should be easy to roll the release more quickly than usual.

Just some ideas...

Thanks,
Alex