Hi Martin,
I'm a little disappointed too by the reaction too. But to be honest we provide no real road for users to drive in to help, so they've come to expect this throw-it-over-the-wall and see what goodies were made this time behaviour.
We do have pre-release versions of Inkscape compiled and ready to test before the release. This is a time when users can peek over the wall, and have a say in what gets tossed over. This should ideally happen at least a month before the release is scheduled, to give professional artists time to test in their production work and feed back to us bugs that should be given priority, or listed as blockers. We can avoid the tremendous bad press in this way, and the soul-crushing reviews that go along with it.
When bugs are listed as blockers, there's usually some debate about whether inkscape's users will find it important enough to block the release of all the goodies that are put in. This should not be a question. If we do not know who our user base is, and what they require from a professional graphics program like Inkscape, we have no hope of delivering what they need. We need more pro artists to test and feed back.
We can start with the people who gave us bad reviews. There are some very well known artists in the FLOSS community, who (like me) pride themselves on using FLOSS in their workflow. They blog about it, they post tutorials, they create massive archives full of stuff done in Inkscape, which not only helps people learn and make art for free, it spreads the awareness and use of Inkscape to present and future generations of graphics people. These are our greatest allies, and they can often be our harshest critics as well. They use Inkscape *all the time*. It's vital that they test for us, and most of them will probably be happy to do so, because it involves improving their toolset as a designer.
If it's desired, I can begin networking with some of them. Let them know that we do want and need their input for future releases. I can also inform them when the newest pre-release is ready for testing. What can I do? Well, I can try to get our pre-releases into as many professional hands as possible before the release.
It's not like we didn't know about this bug - we did. It's more that it wasn't considered a priority. This is because we do not know our user base well enough to know if it was going to be widely considered a catastrophy. I had mentioned before that this would break many of my previous templates, but I was willing to accept the breakage for a better less buggy text tool. It should not have been an either or decision, but it was just me speaking up about it, and I didn't feel I had the clout to proclaim that "most users" would be affected by it, or indeed even care. Saying that today... is just me saying things. We need to KNOW what our pro users want, not guess. To do that, we need to get to know them, and encourage them to lend their own voices to the conversation.
We also must adopt a friendly attitude towards users, even when they are being unpleasant, or unhelpful. The words "patches welcome" should never *ever* be uttered at a user unless they are offering to contribute code. The bad press is not worth it. It's better to be silent than to present an unfriendly face. If someone's angry, they need to be talked down from the anger first, or left alone until the anger subsides. Only then can we grow our helpful userbase. The nicer we are to them, the more they will want to help. It's useful to keep in mind that we all want the same thing: a better Professional graphics tool for everyone.
That said, Inkscape is currently one of the friendliest projects out there, which is what got me to stick around and it's the project I contribute the most to as a result. I want that for other hard-core Inkscape users too.
I do think our disconnect between the user community and developers is biting us, and not just how users show us problems, but also how users help provide us those resources we desperately need to spend a bit more time on issues.
Knowing our users will help us prioritise. We don't need every user of inkscape to contribute, but the users who use Inkscape daily for their paid work (not just as a hobby) are going to be able to help more. We also need more work on fixing what's currently wrong with Inkscape before we dive into more new features. With everything that has recently gone into Inkscape, it's somewhat of a miracle there aren't more problems than we presently have. There's no way, in the middle of all these changes (gtk+ and others) that I would have thought a release was even possible. People have been busting their butts to get everything ready with very little time and a lot of stress to get what we have.
Everyone who contributed to this release deserves high applause for all the work. The difference between public applause and biting criticism is getting the release into a state where the professional graphics community can continue cranking out tons of useful graphics knowing that Inkscape is the same solid production tool they spend time promoting, and especially that all the work they put into making art for distribution and editing with Inkscape will still be usable in versions to come.
In the mean time, the whole team has my personal thanks and encouragement. I will try to get others on board to help.
More soon. -C
This is an insider view, however. Maybe it's time to bring more prominent FLOSS artists into the fold. I can help with outreach if necessary.
Outreach, maybe a bit on energy too. As Mc says, half a dozen isn't enough people to really have the energy to take care of different non- coding tasks.
What would you do CR?
Best Regards, Martin Owens