Testing Issues on KDE4 pre [LWN.net]

Testing Issues on KDE4 pre

Posted Jan 9, 2008 0:53 UTC (Wed) by csawtell (guest, #986)
In reply to: Testing Issues on KDE4 pre by aseigo
Parent article: Aaron Seigo on KDE 4.0

> over the years the free software user base has grown increasingly 
> aggressive, abusive and generally mean spirited; this is because it's 
> grown in size and thus is becoming more representative of the populace at 
> large. we don't have many cultural ways of dealing with truly antisocial 
> outbursts effectively (free software projects are often either too
> nice to say anything or too ready to flame back at full bore;

See the Google Talk entitled How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)

Essentially it's an extensive elaboration on the time honoured dictum:
"Don't feed the trolls". Simple though it is, it really works.

> i honestly wish bugzilla was a lot better,

Don't we all! Personally I am pathologically allergic to it. It seems to have been thrown together by a real genius in a hurry to solve an urgent problem. Subsequently, it's been overlaid by layers of code which attempt to improve the human interface, but which imho largely fail so to do. From my somewhat limited contact with it, Mantis appears to be a far superior solution to the problem.

> and that we had a better distribution mechanism for development releases
> (well, we have the daily live cd's now which are pretty good) ...

But please could you look into the possibility of creating deltup files so that your testing community doesn't have to d/l 500 to 700 megs each day to test and play with the latest and greatest. The mechanism by Nicolai Lissner et al offers an automatic and very practical solution to the problem.

> i do fear that we (the f/oss community) don't spend enough time working 
> on our tools. (ugh, gdb!)

Oh, so true. But eclipse and kdevelop are both pretty fabulous.