On 2010-11-21 12.44, James Turner wrote: > > On 21 Nov 2010, at 01:43, Heiko Schulz wrote: >> I prefer fixing instead of releasing
Fixers and releasers can be different people. Of course, releasers need to be given the power of steering fixers focus. (Yes I know that people are working voluntarily and can spend their time on what they want so please spare me the rant). > There's a key point here - in the past, people only test release > builds - despite pre-relases being made Part of the hope of Hudson, > though I didn't get it working yet, is to make it trivial to produce > pre-release binaries. Once we do that, people (that's people 'not > developers') need to test them, and submit bugs. If you aren't a > coder, and want to make FG better, that's the single most useful > thing you can do. The only QA resource we have, to make the official > releases better, is the end users. That's not ideal, but it's how it > goes. > > (The annual stable release cycle also hinders us here, but that's > another thing we can hopefully improve by making stable releases > happen a bit more often - one month after the 2.0 release, Git/CVS > was in a much better, more stable state than the 2.0 release) > > In the meantime, test the nightlies, or your own build, or any other > recent build, and *file bugs* - and be prepared to re-test them, or > check which open bugs you filed are still hanging around three months > later. If it's a crash, provide a stack-trace, or some consistent > steps to reproduce the crash. I concur with James and like to emphasis the usefulness of releasing often, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often Releasing often will enable developers to fix bugs against well defined states of the software and testers to report problems found in well defined releases. Today, there is a fairly short list of people reporting and testing the development branch and flightgear is missing out from the massive parallel testing potentially available. Harvesting the user base for testing is only possible if packages are made available regularly and easily accessibly. The problem of having users, non-developers, reporting bugs is that is fairly hard to find the proper place to file bug reports for flightgear _AND_ the responses on this list can be ... let us say, dismissive. If non-developers are going to report problems (more than once) they should be met with respect even if they did not file a full report. Developers and hobbyist flightgear builders like me should be able to provide good bug reports but people responding to bug reports must be able to discriminate between types of reporters. I think Hudson is a very good effort and I hope Hudson will soon be able to produce a full (64bit) mac application with the GUI starter and the works. I'd rather be on the user/tester side than keep building flightgear myself. Cheers, Jari ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 & L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today http://p.sf.net/sfu/msIE9-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
