On 8/4/05, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...69...> wrote:
First, not all developers care about testing. In fact, on multiple ocassions I have seen them actively discourage it (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not.)
Hmm, even if this so, I don't think it's the behavior we should encourage.
- Several people (including myself) have attempted to do performance
analysis of Inkscape. Typically this seems to really irritate developers; I recall being chastised that I was wasting my time and should be doing coding on the algorithms or something instead.
I don't remember this, but in any case, it's not something I'd approve. I and I think most other devs are very interested in performance testing and profiling. I have always said so. In fact I do some simple tests myself from time to time and report if they discover notable changes.
- Another good example was your reaction to my posting of warnings found
by the test harness. You remarked, "I'm quite tired of seeing these warnings and complaints."
Sorry, you have entirely misread me. All I wanted to say is, "PLEASE someone finally fix these problems", not "please stop reporting them". I was tired of seeing them _in my compiles_, not on the list! In fact I was even GLAD that someone reported them and thus gave me the pretext to whine about these warnings, as I was too lazy to bring up the subject myself.
As I'd only posted a couple of reports, I found this surprising and rather discouraging. Since then I've held off on posting updates, and think that an inkscape-tester list would be a more inviting place to post them.
If you ever again find my comments weird or discouraging in any way, please don't hesitate to ask me directly. I may not always be able to express my intent entirely clearly.
- A more recent example was when I expressed interest in testing cairo
in Inkscape. This was quite actively discouraged,
Sorry, wrong again. We just agreed that it's premature to integrate it into Inkscape even as an option, at this point. But as for testing, I'm all for it. I would be VERY interested to see more sample renderings and render timings of Cairo.
- Some people are quite willing to help with testing but won't be interested in regular developer discussion.
It's very hard to make such a distinction, IMHO.
Even if all developers were interested in testing, not all testers will be interested in development!
They don't have to read it. They can just post their results and respond to questions, and skip the rest. The reason why this is best done on devel is that it's the only more or less guaranteed way to catch the attention of the specific developer who's responsible for this part of code, and to respond to his specific questions.
If their are quality problems with their code, they'd rather someone approach them directly, rather than having to watch all of the general testing discussion.
Testers often have no way of knowing whose particular problem is this. So they can't do better than to post to the list that ALL devs read.
- Not all traffic on a testing list would be bug reports. Indeed, that's what we have the bug tracker for. Much discussion would go into writing testing scripts
Which is where devs' help is important. Nobody can know better than me how to test my feature.
Even if there was a 100% overlap between inkscape-devel and inkscape-tester, the identity that people would take into that group would be distinct.
In practice this would most likely mean that most of posts will be cross-posted to both lists, as now many posts are cross-posted to devel and user.
A group identity with a focus on testing would emerge
I guess what may result from this is that testers will be discouraged by (perceived) lack of attention from devs. For a typical tester, the ultimate goal is not to participate in a community but to have some issue fixed, and for that, the best (and the only) way is to reach the right developer.
In short, I remain convinced that testing is an absolutely unseparable part of development, so I don't think a separate list (even with the same membership) is such a good idea. Even for the user/devel pair, there's a lot of crossposting and misplaced threads, though I think these twp lists will grow more separate with time. But with testing, I just don't see any reason for it to grow significantly separate from development, ever. (If it does, I don't think it bodes well for the quality of the project.)