[Kde-games-devel] KFourInLine =>Quality Control

[Martin Heni]

KWin4 had a serious bug in it which resulted in no sprite movement at all.
This was caused by a wrong call to a parent function which only showed up in a 
later Qt version. Thus I didnt notice it. Fortunately, someone reported it as 
bug. Unfortunately, as I didnt follow kde mails lately I only saw the a 
repost of the bug a couple of days ago - just in time to prevent a completly 
buggy game in KDE 4.1.  A lot of thanks here to the guy who didnt give up and 
kept posting the bug report!!!

However, this brings me to my favorite issue which I keep posting about once a 
year ;-). I think we need a better quality control and testing of the games. 
If I follow the list the current aim seems to be to integrate as many as 
possible new games into KDE. However, there is obviously little testing and 
bugfixing going on, otherwise someone whould have fixed the kfourinline bug.
Of course, I admit that I myself dont do this either - it is cool to make a 
new game and quite boring to test and bug fix. But I suppose we have to find 
a way to implement such a procedure. Otherwise we will collect more and more 
buggy games.

Especially as games will loose there active maintainer sooner or later we need 
some shared responsibility in the group of active developers to test the 
games of other authors and also bugfix them. Unfortunatly, I have no solution 
to offer here. I am myself not a good example as I dont and cant spend much 
time on bugfixing. (Actually, I would like to give over maintainership or 
find a co-maintainer for my games to someone new - but so far nobody 
volunteered).

Some possible solutions might be:
- Assign not only a maintainer but also a tester to each game. Maybe cross 
assign them. Whoeever has a game in kde also must test another one.
- Find some volunteers which actually like testing and bug fixing.
- Make a qualtiy control board of some active people (really name them). 
Before any KDE release they check the games. They then should keep pusing 
maintainers or others to fix critical bugs. 
- List bug fixers, testers and quality board people more prominently on the 
Game infos and on the web page to improve the interest in these positions