On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Ben Fowler wrote:
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 15:06:26 +0100 From: Ben Fowler <ben.the.mole@...400...> To: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Inkscape stats 9/15/05
I apologise again, but I don't really agree with any of that:
On 9/16/05, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
On 9/16/05, Ben Fowler <ben.the.mole@...400...> wrote:
rather than new features. Ideally we need to know whether the user community would vote for quality and bug fixes or new features ...
This is a "black or white" approach that won't work. Users never want either bug fixes or new features. They want both (and NOW :)).
Speaking personally, a lot of the software that I use evolved their necessary feature set around 10 years ago. I would always vote for quality and bug fixes, and in some cases actual removal of features. Whilst this sounds heretical, this is not a rare and not even an especially unusual point of view.
Principally, _any_ pre-1.0 release should be considered as buggy.
This is the assumption we have been working on but then people have been getting carried away saying how great Inkscape is even though we all know it has great big problems too.
We all like Inkscape and are enthusiastic about it but overselling it is counterproductive. There is an old story about a chieftian telling his daughter her husband in the arranged marraige was an ugly brute. He figured that way she would be pleased with whatever she got (as the story goes he was not ugly at all). We dont need to make big claims about Inkscape, if we can get them to try it users should quickly realise for themselves it is pretty good.
Yes, but we have end users using Inkscape for their regular work.
The reality is distributions are shipping Inkscape and users are expecting a level of stability more than developers expect. There is also no way distributions can keep up with the fast releases coming from inkscape as they are stuck on a 6 month/yearly cycle.
In the long term I think it would be good to have a stripped down stable supported release of inkscape maybe every six months or once a year to avoid the distributions shipping something which makes Inkscape look bad.
They do not want regressions, and (to repeat) are entitled to have their views concerning features listened to.
Listen to the users. Say thank you to them for making the effort to provide us with feedback. Explain the limitations, manage their expectations and get to the enhancements when we can. If they know not to expect too much they wont be disappointed. If we dont do this we allow a predictable problem to happen and users will expect as much as they expect from fully supported commercial software.
I think that everything that we release should be as good as we can make it, and if something is forward looking (untested and could have showstopping bugs) then it should be labelled as -HEAD dr or possibly alpha.
People are already treating Inkscape like it is a stable product even if it is in fact a fast moving alpha/beta stage project. Something should be done to accomodate or compensate for that perception.
(Are we still getting questions about the Extensions not found warning?)
This is why I suggest that from a developer's point of view, we either need to be able to slipstream older bug fixes (my thaw policy as outlined above) or have protected releases when we only do bug fixes. Obviously the latter might be ruled out if you felt it was anathema, unnecessary pre-0.1 or not possible owing to the large number of enhancements going through.
I'm not going to get into specifics but I think this discussion reveals a problem we are aware of on some level and needs to be managed.
This is where I expect Bryce to step in without some wise words, to crystalize the situation and suggest a workable plan to help manage it.
;)
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/