Subject: And after just 6 short months...
From: Paul Egli (pegli@sourcegear.com)
Date: Tue Oct 31 2000 - 16:41:04 CST
Dear AbiWord community,
I'm excited about the things that are going on right now in AbiWord's
development. As much as I would like to continue to be a part of all that's
happening, I will no longer be able to devote time to AbiWord due to my
increasing responsibilities at SourceGear.
My involvement in AbiWord in the past has consisted mostly of (1)reviewing
submitted bugs in bugzilla, (2)verifying "QA to Verify" bugs in bugzilla,
and (3)reviewing patches sent to the patches@abisource address.
(1) When a bug is submitted, I would review it, and usually take one of a
few basic actions. If I recognized the bug as a duplicate of another bug, I
would mark it as such (or mark the old one as a duplicate of the new,
depending on the situation). If the bug was not a duplicate, I would try to
reproduce the problem described. If I could reproduce it, then I would open
the bug and add comments or create a test case if needed. If I could not
reproduce a bug, I would e-mail the reporter to see whether they could
provide more information.
(2) For bugs in the "QA to Verify" state there were, again, general steps I
would usually follow after reviewing a bug.
For those marked as Fixed or WorksForMe, I would test the bug to see if I
could reproduce it. If not, I would close it. If I could still reproduce
the problem, I would open it, usually adding additional comments to the bug
regarding how I reproduced it and/or why I thought it had been incorrectly
marked as QA.
For bugs marked as duplicates, I would usually verify that it was a
duplicate by closing the bug, often adding comments to the bug of which it
was a duplicate. If I felt the bug was't really a duplicate, I would reopen
the bug and add comments. (Always feel free to append comments to a bug
report. As open source developers most of you already realize that
communication and clarity are key values in creating quality software :)
I simply had to use my best judgement on most of the other QA bugs
(Invalid, WontFix, etc).
Lately, I had been getting way behind in both areas of bugzilla management,
especially on Linux. Now that I'll be gone, someone may want to step up to
the task of bugzilla QA work. Perhaps having a person for each platform
would be the ideal situation.
(3) As for the patches sent to patches@abisource, I would apply the patch
on my computer. If everything went in smoothly, worked correctly, and was
something I thought should go into the tree, I would commit the code to
CVS. If I ran into trouble (compile-time errors, bugs, etc) I would e-mail
the author of the patch explaining what happened.
To my knowledge, Sam is the only one currently on the patches list. If
anyone else would also like to be on it, and relieve Sam of having full
responsibility of this, please contact Sam to volunteer.
It has been mentioned before that SourceGear's build farm is going away. I
would like to mention that cutting binary releases here at SourceGear was
always a big mess, usually taking several days to get everything sorted
out. Expect a seemingly endless chain of frustrations whenever it comes
time to cut another binary release. Maintaining the world's only open
source, cross-platform word processor isn't easy, but it's worth it.
I will no longer be on the abiword-developer mailing list, but I can still
be reached at this address (pegli@sourcegear.com) and of course I'd love to
hear from you.
As sad as I am to be leaving the AbiWord development scene, I will still be
a proud AbiWord user. AbiWord is certainly my WP of choice (well, I'm still
waiting for a MacOS port). Thank you all for such a great experience in
software development and for producing such a great word processor.
-Paul Egli
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