Thiago, it seems you have taken my comments as a personal attack on you and you have responded (naturally) in a defensive way.
Well, I tried to make it very clear from my opening sentence that this was *not* a personal attack on you (or anyone else for that matter). In fact, I *thought* I made it obvious how much I am aware and appreciative of your own massive and positive contributions to Qt in general. So, if I failed in my communication skills and caused you to feel "attacked" then I am sorry. But please know, that was most definitely not my intention. The remainder of your comments are, as I also said before, most likely absolutely "spot on" in terms of their level of accuracy. But I think the key point here that perhaps you are missing is that for me and I suspect for many "customers", Qt is a commercial product and a support contract that we pay for. I see the entity that I am paying that money to as "The Qt Company". Whether or not the Qt *project* is "open source" is neither here nor there in the context of one business paying another for a product and support. So, your extensive commentary on the ins and outs of maintaining an open source project are probably very relevant in that context and I am sure you know far more about those kind of matters than most (including me). Further, your motivations for contributing your time and expertise to this project are indeed honourable and, I have never suggested anything else. So, please, understand that I am not in any way even trying to be critical of *you* and, on the contrary, I'm actually singing your praises! I think we at crossed paths here and perhaps this is not the appropriate forum for me to put forward the comments I am making. If that's the case then, again, I am sorry and please direct me to a more appropriate forum. To summarise, I am speaking from the perspective of a paying customer of a commercial entity. And I suspect I am not the only one. > On 5 Oct. 2016, at 10:09, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macie...@intel.com> wrote: > > Em quarta-feira, 5 de outubro de 2016, às 08:13:38 CEST, John C. Turnbull > escreveu: >> Thiago, with all due respect, and I'm very aware of the significant >> contribution you personally have made to both the Qt product and the >> community, there is clearly a high degree of dissatisfaction with various >> aspects of Qt and the management of the SDLC. > > What's SDLC? Software Development Life Cycle? > > The Qt Project actually has a very good cycle for an Open Source project. > It's > certainly of much higher quality and stricter standards than 95%+ of other > open source software out there. I can tell you that we run more unit tests a > day than the Linux kernel does in a month (or maybe a year). > >> Your comments may be accurate but I'm not sure they have appeased many of >> the disgruntled customers. > > That may be, but facts and truth often don't serve to appease people. They're > more often than not a harsh reality. > > I could have stayed silent, though, like I've done with the rest of this > thread. > >> My advice (for what it's worth) would be to not ignore the swelling >> negativity that is building amongst paying customers and to see that there >> are some very genuine concerns out there that are making the task of >> putting food on the table more difficult than it need be for some people. > > I'm not ignoring the negativity and I doubt anyone is. But people who > complain > often have trouble putting their issues in the context of everything else > that > is going on. > > Also, I don't have any customers. I don't receive a penny, directly or > indirectly, of licensing fees or support contracts. Other people and other > companies involved may have a financial incentive. I don't. All I care are > the > Open Source principles and the technical quality. > >> It is troubling that you say that often developers simply don't *know* how >> to fix bugs. That does not engender a high degree of confidence in >> customers who have focused their entire business strategic plans on such a >> product. > > Again, that may be, but what would you rather I said? That developers are > magic geniuses that can fix anything, with little information, in no time at > all and twice on Sundays? C'mon, we're all limited, no one is perfect. > > But note I wasn't saying either that the developers are stupid. Far from it. > The most likely cause of not knowing how to fix is that the bug report is > incomplete or the issue is not reproducible. I had one recently that attached > a very nice testcase, with even a shell script that ran everything and set up > properly. And yet, after running for several hours, I couldn't reproduce the > issue. > > I also have two pending patches to QtDBus that fix some regressions > introduced > in 5.6.0 that I still haven't been able to get integrated because they > trigger > another regression somewhere that doesn't happen for me. How can I fix that? > > Sometimes we can reproduce the issue, but then we end up with a situation > that > is so thorny that there is no good solution. Change something here and > everything unravels over there. Or the bug fix introduces regressions. > > And then there are people depending on the buggy behaviour. Example: I > noticed > that the QFile::created() function did not give you the file's creation time > on > BSDs (including Apple OSes), but the file's ctime. The fix was simple. But if > I > applied it the way I wanted, I would break people's applications that > depended > on created() returning the ctime. > >> Further, appearing to be somewhat dismissive of the constructive criticism >> regarding the absence of Agile methodologies within the Qt processes and >> basically saying "that's the way it is", again, may not be seen as helpful >> by some customers. > > You can ask for transparency. You can ask for more attention to bug reports > with high priority. You can demand that all bug reports be triaged. I support > you on all of those. > > But you can't tell us how to do our jobs. Agile doesn't work for us and I > don't know a single, large open source project with contributors from > multiple > companies and across multiple geographies that uses Agile. Trust me when I > say > that our methodology actually works: we fix hundreds of bugs per release, we > catch almost all serious regressions and yet we still have time for > innovation. > >> You know the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". >> >> Well, sadly, it *is* "broke". >> >> And even though I personally don't know how, its way past time to "fix it". > > Give me an example of a comparable open source project and we'll emulate. > > -- > Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com > Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center > > _______________________________________________ > Interest mailing list > Interest@qt-project.org > http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
