On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 10:59:08AM -0700, Krzysztof Kosi??ski wrote:
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.
Okay, understood. No, 'abuse' is far from a neutral term. For reference it is often used in relation to child molestation or wife beating.
Like Bulia points out, we've generally striven to keep discussions civil and productive in the past, so it stands out when extreme wording is used, perhaps more than it should.
Regarding my assertions:
- "there is no release where this bug is fixed" - this boils down to how we
define a release. 2. "Calling SVN snapshot builds "releases" is just weird" - I didn't find a project that would consider their nightly trunk builds "releases". 3. "their quality is not suitable for general use" - SVN trunk is rarely release-quality.
Basically it sounds like the point of dispute is that we define the nightlies to be good enough to be treated as "releases" for the Fix Released status, but you disagree with this.
In pure form, 'Fix Committed' literally means the fix is committed to a version control system, but not yet available for users in a way they can consume. And 'Fix Released' in its literal state means it's available in a tarball or other package that can be downloaded and used by the public at large.
Development releases sit in sort of a gray area in that they're not "official", so require a bit more thought.
Ubuntu treats a bug as Fix Released when .debs have been built for the package in question and are available from the development archive. They don't wait until the distro is officially released. Nor in fact do they even wait until there is an alpha release.
Ubuntu actually uses a mechanises process built into the build system to flip bugs from Fix Committed to Fix Released, once its done building the packages and posting them for users to sync. No promises that Ubuntu overall is installable or usable.
For us, in theory we would set the bug to Fix Committed when we checked in the code, and have our snapshot builders flip them to Fix Released at the point that they make the compiled packages available. But in practice we don't have things set up that way, so just have developers set bugs directly to Fix Released at commit time, and trust that the nightly builds will work.
Now, part of the argument is that the nightlies aren't stable. I'd say that's actually not material to the discussion; I've never heard someone define a state for a particular bug in terms of the overall project's state. But I think it's worthwhile to address this as well.
For a considerable period of time, most Inkscape users I spoke to would use svn snapshots preferentially to the release due to new features. Indeed, the stability of the nightlies was a point of pride in the project.
The 0.46->0.47 development was planned from the start to involve major refactoring work that we knew would destabilize the tree, which it sounds like it has. But don't extrapolate this to mean that every development period is similarly unstable; on the contrary, the Inkscape team has tended to be very conscious of using a refactoring approach that keeps the tree always buildable and relatively stable. Indeed, because of that practice we'd put off a number of major rearchitecting efforts that were risky, and decided to bite the bullet now, accept that the dailies would be more unstable than usual, and return to our normal practices in the future.
So like I said before, this probably just indicates we need to get through a release.
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.
No, according to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Status it just means it's committed someplace, it makes no promises that the user can easily get the snapshot tarball or built publically. If a bug is fixed in the current development branch, that's sufficient for marking it Fix Released.
Bryce