On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 16:02:29 -0700 From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> To: bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> Cc: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...>, inkscape-devel@...6... Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Inkscape 0.43
On Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 07:23:35PM -0300, bulia byak wrote:
On 8/27/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> wrote:
For even releases, we use the tallied bug counts like we've done before, but for odd releases (starting with 0.43), we instead count RFE scores.
This may be a good idea, but consider that a feature needs much more time to be done well, on average, than a bug. A quick bug fix is good, but a "quick feature" is not always so. I don't think we have a lot of "easy" ones in the tracker anyway.
True, although since we've mined the bug tracker pretty heavily of the easy bugs over the past several releases, but haven't done that at all for the RFE tracker, I suspect for this first time through we may find more quick features than we'd find otherwise.
Knowing how good the Inkscape team is at knocking out features, I think we could set our goal at 400 points worth of features.
I think that's too high. Unless we count everything starting from 0.42.
Sure, I can start the counting from the 0.42 release. I set the goal high because while I know you've been good at checking and closing features, my bet is that there are ones you've missed, and I bet we may be able to get a lot of points just from those.
Also most RFEs are unprioritized at 5 (and unlike bugs, how are we to prioritize them - by difficulty? by importance?)
Yes, I've noticed this. I asked Alan, and he's volunteered to help with this tomorrow.
Spent most of the afternoon trawling through the Inkscape requests.
Even if you are not interested in triaging bugs/requests it would be very useful if everyone read through the reports more often. Many reports are terribly vague and all too often ask for a very specific feature but with no mention of what the problem might actually be.
For this reason I targetted bugs marked as "nobody" and went through some of them. I did a lot of marking them down, anonymous bugs with out adequate explanations do not deserve high priority.
I increased the priority some reports which I believed were relatively simple or already planned and possible even fixed already.
There are silly amounts of duplicate reports requesting support for $FILE-FORMAT and we need some way to discourage people from posting more of these. And people requesting ABC XYZ and 123 all in the same report is horribly annoying too.
I'm sure there are more than a few reports which could be consolidated and perhaps developers could put things on the roadmap.
I have some thoughts about the need to allow third party shape tools as extensions but I dont really have time to discuss it, but the short version is Inkscape cannot possible support all the things being requested of it and there is a strong tendancy for people to suggest features from Dia/Visio/Xfig and the other old unix application they know but would like an update of but although these features might be nice to have the are something of a tangent to what I think Inkscape is really about and that is giving artists a tool to use. (Technical drawing is already quite well catered for.)
It's a good question about how to decide how to prioritize them. Offhand, I think RFEs that a lot of users want would score higher. RFEs that augment existing functionality would score higher than ones that require extensive new development work. Beyond that, I think RFE scoring is going to be fairly subjective no matter how we approach it; perhaps we should just accept that the scores will be a bit arbitrary initially, and maybe as we go through the process we'll get a better opinion of how they should be scored, and adjust accordingly.
It helps if people comment if they change the priority as it is hard to tell otherwise what is happening.
I'm tired hungry and I'm going home.
- Alan