With 0.37 happily out the door, we're ready to kick off the event you've all been looking forward to - yup, the BUG HUNT.
Over the past few releases we've closed an insane number of bugs. Out of a total of 187 bugs that have been submitted, only 61 remain open. Particularly, we've been very attentive to close any bug that leads to a crash. No matter how obscure the bug, we don't want Inkscape to crash - ever!
But there's a lot of smaller bugs that don't cause crashes, that are no less important to get fixed.
Our goal for this release is to close a lot of bugs. Since we usually have focused mainly on the critical bugs, this time let's instead focus on the older bugs, that normally don't get much attention. Let's make our objective for 0.38 to either reduce the number of bugs submitted before the 0.37 release announce on 2/15/04 to fewer than 10, or to reduce our ratio of open-to-total bugs from 30% to 10%.
2/18 Goal ---- ---- 1. Bugs 841633-896992 52 9 2. Open/Total Bug Ratio 33% 10%
Now, it may take some time for us to achieve this. If it looks like it's going to take significantly more than a month, then we should do a few 0.37.x point releases along the way. When we've achieved either objective 1 or objective 2, we will release 0.38.
I think having a numerical goal will make this a fun release, even though it's just bug fixing, in that our progress towards the goal will be very easy to see. And having two objectives will hopefully help us avoid getting frustrated if we get stuck trying to meet one.
A few notes on how to handle bugs. First, when reviewing a bug ask if it really is a feature request in disguise. If so, don't be shy about kicking it over to be an RFE. Second, you may find that the bug is a symptom of a larger underlying problem; in this case, perhaps consider finding some way to address the symptom directly and close the bug, and write up in detail what needs to be done to address the larger problem and submit that as an RFE.
Bryce