Re: How frozen? (Re: Patch: use std::string)

--- Robert Staudinger <robert.staudinger@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 1/17/07, Dominic Lachowicz <domlachowicz@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I suggest the following time table:
> >
> > Do you think that we have that far to go before AbiWord 2.6? Maybe
> I'm
> > deluding myself, but my impression is that we're no more than maybe
> 1
> > month of bug-fixing and testing away from it.
>
> Same here (concerning "abi"), regarding abiword-plugins (abicollab to
> name it), not so sure. Marc
> said he would see us releasing in three months and i assume this is
> based on his knowledge about abicollab state of the art.
>
> Labelling abicollab as experimental and releasing ASAP would be
> totally ok for me, to be honest, the earlier we release, the better
> IMO.

To be blunt: releasing 2.6.0 in one month would be completely insane.
I know 2.5.0 took over a year to be released, but let's not forget that
saving, printing, and rendering were each broken for months during that
period (i.e. AbiWord 2.5.0 wasn't being continuously improved during
those months - it was pretty much struggling to regain the
functionality of 2.4). Now, if everyone thinks a release in one month
makes the most sense (it doesn't), I'm not going to get in your way;
but do realize that every major release of AbiWord seems to completely
ignore the state of Bugzilla in favor of these month-based timetables
that have little connection with the true state of the product (yes,
the same argument was made before 2.4:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/2005/Jul/0046.html).

I guess I just find it completely bewildering that history gets ignored
with each release, making sure that every new version of AbiWord is
just as buggy as the last -- if not buggier. This collective mindset
of agreeing to ship with "experimental" features has pretty much made
AbiWord a _collection_ of experimental features, ones introduced with
much fanfare during their respective release cycles and then ignored
thereafter (see: text boxes, text wrapping, revisions, visual drag and
drop, grammar checking, etc.); feel free to count the number of fixes
these features have seen since they were introduced (hint: you might
not even need both hands for some). Anyway, I'd urge you to read MG's
email above (especially the end) for a sane approach to making sure
each release of AbiWord is significantly better than the last one (not
just for 2.6, but for future releases, as well). And if you don't
agree, let me know so I can stop holding out hope for a mature, stable AbiWord.

 
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Received on Wed Jan 17 22:59:08 2007