Bryce Harrington-5 wrote:
Every assertion you make in this last paragraph can be debated. However, using the inflammatory term "abuse" in reference to our current processes makes it sound like you're just trolling anyway.
I'm not trolling. I'm aware that recently I'm sounding overly critical of everything. Don't take it personally - it's just because I prefer to focus on things that I think can be improved rather than things that are already good. When problems don't get talked about, they don't get solved. There are many great things about Inkscape, like the open and inclusive culture, the simple yet powerful UI, the incredible rate of new development going on, and I could spend hours writing about them, but it wouldn't make Inkscape any better than it is now.
Back to the bug status issue. I'm not a native speaker and thought that "abuse" is a relatively neutral term, so take it with a grain of salt. Regarding my assertions:
1. "there is no release where this bug is fixed" - this boils down to how we define a release. I think an official release (what distros call "upstream releases") is a good definition. If we had a formal development release process, we could also include development releases in this definition. 2. "Calling SVN snapshot builds "releases" is just weird" - I didn't find a project that would consider their nightly trunk builds "releases". There are some projects that roll out development releases, like Gnome, but those follow a formal release process. They use Bugzilla, which doesn't distinguish between "fix committed" and "fix released", but bugs are reported against a specific version of an application. This provides roughly the same amount of information as the "Fix Committed" status. Perhaps I should have used the words "very unusual" instead of "just weird". 3. "their quality is not suitable for general use" - SVN trunk is rarely release-quality. 4. "they are not supposed to make it into distributions or official Windows installers" - there are installers for SVN snapshots, but they are not listed as official releases on Inkscape's homepage. I think I don't need to explain this further because several people here know much more about release management than I do.
By the way, I don't know what is imprecise about the Fix Committed status. To the user it says: it will be fixed in the next version, wait for it or download an SVN snapshot to get rid of this bug. To the developer it says: you don't need to work on this, somebody else already fixed it. I agree that in the context of a developer the difference between "Fix Committed" and "Fix Released" is minor - both say that you don't need to work on this issue. For users and release managers it is an important distinction.
Regards, Krzysztof Kosiński