On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Kevin Krammer <krammer@xxxxxxx> wrote:
What about beta2?
As stated before, the best way to find bugs is constant usability testing. Beta 1 and beta 2 have a few days in between releases, so what do you expect these testers to upgraded every day and yet use their system normally? Instead they attempt to just see if everything works externally, and upgrade to the next beta. The same happens with RC releases. These frequent releases cause confusion. By the time you find a bug for RC1, RC2 is already out, and the devs in the bugzilla will ask for you to upgrade. Who has that much of patience?
If you want constant usability testing, the target userbase should be somewhere between devs and end users; these people want a usable system, and don't mind testing. But for that to happen the releases should be slow, so it reaches them and it's convenient to them.
The current schedule adds a lot of workload.
Also real testing starts with RC after the freeze -- which ensures no new bugs. But unfortunately, there's not even a month between RC3 and the freeze -- how do you expect to find new bugs in a few weeks?
The final (stable) release is hurried up for January; so what do you expect, a rock solid DE?
Instead there should be 3 or 4 months between RCs, so bug can be collected and the RC releases reach across layers of users; it shouldn't happen that before the release reaches the user, it becomes outdated by 2 other releases.
On Saturday, 2013-03-23, dE . wrote:I am not sure I understand this fully, isn't this what already happens?
> Cause of this behaviour of distros, KDE gets less chance to get tested. The
> only solution is to elongate the release cycles, that way, each version of
> the DE gets tested slowly by every advanced users; so they face and report
> bugs before the very end user face them.
Due to the way of how distributions undergo their development cycles it
effectively already increased the testing phase for software they contain.
First each software is tested by the respective community's beta testers, then
each software is tested even more widely by the distribution's beta phase and
after that by its early upgraders.
I would guess that at the point a normal user upgrades the software has been
in testing for a couple of months, maybe even half a year.
Lets have a look at the most recent version
KDE SC 4.10 Beta 1 tag was in November 2012 at which point it is most likely
tested by KDE beta testers. This continues until February 2013 (about three
months).
If we take openSUSE as an example distribution, its respective release is
March 2013, adding another monthof testing by people who build from source.
The test audience at this point has expanded to include early upgraders of
openSUSE.
What about beta2?
As stated before, the best way to find bugs is constant usability testing. Beta 1 and beta 2 have a few days in between releases, so what do you expect these testers to upgraded every day and yet use their system normally? Instead they attempt to just see if everything works externally, and upgrade to the next beta. The same happens with RC releases. These frequent releases cause confusion. By the time you find a bug for RC1, RC2 is already out, and the devs in the bugzilla will ask for you to upgrade. Who has that much of patience?
If you want constant usability testing, the target userbase should be somewhere between devs and end users; these people want a usable system, and don't mind testing. But for that to happen the releases should be slow, so it reaches them and it's convenient to them.
The current schedule adds a lot of workload.
Also real testing starts with RC after the freeze -- which ensures no new bugs. But unfortunately, there's not even a month between RC3 and the freeze -- how do you expect to find new bugs in a few weeks?
The final (stable) release is hurried up for January; so what do you expect, a rock solid DE?
Instead there should be 3 or 4 months between RCs, so bug can be collected and the RC releases reach across layers of users; it shouldn't happen that before the release reaches the user, it becomes outdated by 2 other releases.
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