[QGIS-Developer] QGIS 3.0 beta

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 08-07-17 10:13, Matthias Kuhn wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Not too far away we will enter feature freeze for QGIS 3.0 and will be
> trying to polish the next release as much as possible.
> 
> During this time, a lot of testing will need to be done in order to be
> able to best spend the bugfixing time. There are a handful of people who
> regularly test nightlies and report bugs (thanks!).
> 
> I wonder if it's possible to attract more testers for the next release
> by providing a "beta".
> 
> I think releasing a version labelled "beta" at the beginning of the
> feature freeze (and another one half way through) will make more people
> aware of the upcoming release. This can lead to additional important
> testing from audience which otherwise would only "test" the final
> release (with a lower acceptance of bugs). Besides that, I think it will
> also be a good signal for devs to start porting plugin code and a very
> good preparation for end users marketing-wise.
> 
> It will be best served with a blog post explaining how critical the
> bugfixing phase is for a release and how resources for this are allocated.
> 
> It's just an idea I had in mind for some time. Does anyone dislike it?

Yep, I was thinking about something like this too: BUT there is always
the tension between willing to show and test a new version AND giving
the average user an as stable possible QGIS to work with.
So either work with some beta's OR consider 3.0 (and 3.2?) more or less
as versions which will have some growing pains? Though that is hard to
sell to the average user I think...

Other wild ideas:
- call 3.0 something like: Beta, Troje or Atlantis ;-)

And do a lot of communication that people should really test it in the
actual/real workflows to catch actual usability issues. But also... do
keep in mind that due to the changes in api's, code, Qt, Python etc etc
it is more likely that things will break or crash.

Yesterday I hit the first crash screen (on a Windows machine):

https://files.gitter.im/qgis/QGIS/kjUe/image.png
(ended up as https://issues.qgis.org/issues/16810 by the way)

Nice work, Nathan!

And looking at it, 3.0/beta should probably also have debug info so the
Stack Trace is as descriptive as possible?

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde