[Kde-pim] Venting

[David Jarvie]

On Thursday 8 Feb 2007 21:05, Allen Winter wrote:

>Howdy,
>
>I'm discouraged.
>
>Nearly everything I tried  today in a kdepim+ application is broken
>or causes a crash.  Ok, just Kontact, KMail, and KOrganizer.
>KAlarm worked fine.  KAddressbook worked too.
>
>+ Marking a recurring to-do done -> asks for what resource to save (why?
>   it already knows).  and it asks twice.  and then crashes
>+ New To-do editor -> has a start year thousands of years in the future
>+ Kontact Summary view has a strange vertical increasing of the status bar
>    whenever the mouse moves over a link
>+ KMail Templates need a lot more work (and documentation) than we
>    found during testing
> etc. etc, plus bugs reported by Tm_T.
>
>Almost all the problems I encountered are in the official 3.5.6 release.
>
>And then there's the never ending stream of kdepim-bugs.
>
>Blah.  Not that I have any magic solutions.  Just venting my
>frustrations and discouragement.

If only kdepim had a bug-fixing team and a quality team :( I suppose that on
the whole, developers probably prefer developing new stuff to fixing bugs,
and quality testing must come bottom of the heap - without automated test
suites for GUI driven progams (preferably created by somebody else -
creating them isn't much fun either), it's a pretty tedious and time consuming
exercise to thoroughly check that changes to programs haven't produced
unwanted side-effects. It's easier to leave it to users ;) Unfortunately,
bugs tend to pile up, and if we gave them top priority, new development
would come to a halt for quite a while.

I wonder if the new kdepim enterprise branch might help answer some of
these problems. Is there any scope for encouraging distros and
commercial users to do quality testing and bug fixing and feed back the
results to the enterprise branch? After all, they are in a better position to
make people do the things we don't get round to doing. It would be in all
our interests to make kdepim applications more stable.

I share your frustration.

--
David Jarvie.
KAlarm author & maintainer.
http://www.astrojar.org.uk/linux/kalarm.html
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