Guys,
Inkscape's openness and the ease of contributing to it are wonderful. However, I would like to remind you that if you commit a change, by this very act you suggest that at least one of the following is true:
1 You are a heavy user of the changed/added feature, and you are sure you yourself can discover and fix most related bugs soon, if not already.
2 You intend to be around for a reasonable amount of time after your commit, _watch_ for bug reports related to your change, and fix them _promptly_.
If none of these are true, please REFRAIN FROM COMMITTING until you can make them true.
Why rant about it now? Two of the recent regressions are so nasty that they forced me downgrade to 0.43 for my daily work, painful as it is. Not being able to use the latest CVS - oops, sorry, SVN - is so annoying that I just can't help speaking out. The people who caused these regressions are known with a reasonable level of certainty, and I asked them to fix the bugs (or at least look into them) numerous times. The bugs are:
- export selection is broken (likely caused by Carl's changes in libnr)
- F6 and F8 keys don't work (most certainly caused by Jon Cruz' swatches panel)
I don't want to blame anyone, because these people may have some genuine reasons to be unable to fix these bugs. Or, it may be that the bugs are not caused by them at all. After all, I myself am too busy with work right now, so I can't even investigate these bugs in more detail, let alone fix them.
However, I feel that this is still a good occasion to state what I have stated: DO NOT COMMIT if you will be unable to support your change at least for the length of one full release cycle, and especially if you can't be on guard for the first few weeks when most of the bugs are found.
Thanks,
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org