[bt-devel] Bug-a-thon

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

My schedule yesterday didn't go exactly as planned. I was very
disappointed for not getting there in time for the bug-a-thon meeting.
So, only some afterthoughts here...

A feature-a-thon is a good idea. But what is needed more is a
test-a-thon. I have repeated this ad nauseam but we really, really need
better testing. We have had some major changes (e.g. bookshelf manager
long time ago; WebKit and javascript; model/view bookshelf). They all
have showed bugs, even serious ones, after long time. If developers
would have been more careful and really tested all features there
wouldn't be so many bugs.

But I know how difficult it is to have the right attitude for testing,
and it's common knowledge that a developer is not a good tester for his
own code. Therefore I suggest that we have a test-a-thon where we would
assing areas and each tester would test all features and workflows of
his own area. We could share experiences and confirm issues on different
platforms in real time. Another possibility could be to take one
area/feature at a time and test it together. At the same time we could
discuss about usability issues.

I guess the result would be depressing and we should definitely have a
new bug-a-thon afterwards :)

About moving to a newer version of Qt...

We can't take Qt 4.6. The next goal is 4.5. Distros won't support 4.6
for a longish time, and backporting for older ones gets difficult or
impossible if we use the latest Qt. Here are some distro versions and
supported Qt version:

(K)ubuntu 8.04 (LTS) 2008/04: 4.4 as a backport? - I used it until this
week
(K)ubuntu 8.10 2008/10: 4.4.3
(K)ubuntu 9.04 2009/04: 4.5.0
(K)ubuntu 9.10 2009/10: 4.5.3

Debian 5.0 lenny 2009/02: 3.3 (yes, really, maybe 4.x as a backport?)
Debian testing and unstable: 3.3 (yes, REALLY, according to
distrowatch.com, and debian.org seems to be down so I can't check)

Fedora 10 2008/11: 4.4.3
Fedora 11 2009/06: 4.5.0

OpenSUSE 11.1 2008/12: 4.4.3
OpenSUSE 11.2 2009/11: 4.5.3

Mandriva 2009 2008/10: 4.4.3
Mandriva 2009.1 2009/04: 4.5.0
Mandriva 2010 2009/11: 4.5.3

We can now adopt 4.5 because I finally updated to Kubuntu 9.10 :) But
then we probably have to drop Kubuntu 8.10 (long term support)
backportability. I just read the post from jmarsden and I agree with him
that we shouldn't make rushed decisions.

Actually the only reason I find for abandoning 4.4 and taking 4.5 is
that we can then easily drop the boost library dependency. And even for
that 4.5 isn't compulsory because we can either use ifdefs or just use
manual memory management with new/delete. Using boost scoped pointer is
just for convenience. The boost dependency is bad mostly on Windows
where it takes for developers a huge download and unzipping (with my old
laptop unpacking took more time than compiling some other libraries!).


  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)