[Qgis-developer] Release schedule discussion - again

[Régis Haubourg]

Sandro Santilli-2 wrote
> 
>> My plea to sponsors:
>> 
>> If you're funding QGIS development work and the contract doesn't
>> mention something like "we will totally soak this work in unit tests"
>> then rip up the contract and run. (Or ask them nicely to revise the
>> contract to include this ;) ) If you're funding work and it's not
>> being accompanied by unit tests then you aren't getting what you paid
>> for, and you'll be forever forced to test your funded features in
>> every new release manually for regressions...
> 
> +FF
> 
> --strk;

I'm not a sponsor since there is now legal way for me to sponsor you by now.
QGIS project still does not gather all financial ressources that are
possible there. Maybe a discussion on paying Open Source licence for
Enterprise users who wish to contribute could be a workaround?

However, I have included Unit tests in all the new features or plugins I
funded. Yesterday, my plugin broke twice because of an API change. Should we
also push plugin unit tests to Travis? 

Unit tests will never be sufficient for such large and GUI tool like QGIS,
relying on so much different libraries. We need to reinforce that, but not
misconsidering how much user test are critical is a mistake. 

Loosing advanced users for testing, especially in by corps, is not wise. 
When Paolo says that such big enterprises should be able to put some money
for more tests, you are quite wrong for public corps I think.

Why?
 - Geo informatics are still misunderstood by decision makers, except for
those who are in the field of geospatial. We are often only 1 or 2 to
maintain, deploy, teach, fund QGIS, and maintain Postgis, web servers,
metadata catalog, Talend Jobs to feed all that with data. Open Source
revolution gave us tools that offered us more possibilities, less
administrative charges, and allowed uses to explode literally. That does not
make our employer prone to hire more persons. 

 - Some of us do that time to try to move forward with tools, maybe 10% max
of us. I push a lot in QGIS, when my job is to handle data, not softwares.
That worked, user are happy, so I gained new credits (more than in Mapinfo
era !). But now, I can't have enough time to spend it correctly. When I do,
my features are postponed by lack of QGIS resources. We are not on a good
way, please here that. LTR or not is not at stake here. 

I keep on trying to push new use cases, and polish every day's tools, but
that's a bit hard from here. I try to publish roadmaps before contracts,
very few answers from PSC on that.  Could PSC offer a workspace where we can
share the future, and give feedback and set priorities on all those tasks? 
If that place exists, is used and QEP's are always done, I think we can
handle fast releases, because like Mozilla, we plan a bit what is coming. 


Cheers
Régis



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