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

[Sandro Santilli]

On Wed, Jul 01, 2015 at 04:36:07AM -0700, Tom Chadwin wrote:
> 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.

Agreed, quality assurance is an important aspect.
And I'm glad it's improving so much lately.

> 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.

Would you be willing to buy an yearly subscription for a QA service
on QGIS releases ? Think of it as an alternative to an yearly usage
license acquisition. If enough corporate users would be ok with that,
I'm sure the QGIS PSC will be very happy to have someone with the
right core skills take care of that part time. 360 euro a year by
100 users would mean being able to spend 3000 euro per month on a QA
officier (just an example).

> 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.

It's not about decisions, but about putting the money where they are needed.

--strk; 

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