Bryce Harrington wrote:
[...] Anyway, it's too bad that the three responses so far have not been supportive to the idea. I feel very strongly that this change would benefit Inkscape, just as adopting a bug tracker helped stability, establishing open development processes helped usability, and establishing a release process helped installability. Am I the only person that thinks we could benefit from an organized testing community?
It seems to me, and I've been around computers since 1970 and using Linux since 1996, that testing software independent of developers, programmers and coders is fundamental to the process. As Linux gets more mature we should see more of that. Each package should have, in my opinion, a set of testers using a wide variety of hardware and distros to find and point out problems.
Linux as a whole needs more structure to guide its progress if it is ever to be a player on the desktop, versus Apple and Microsoft. The whole thing right now reminds me of what was happening in the early '80s. Unix had a good chance of being a desktop player but for the unbelievable problems of getting everyone to pull in the same direction. Enough said about that.
Let's have a testing group with its mail list.
Frank