[Scribus] Torture testing Scribus

[Gregory Pittman]

DaleCoz at aol.com wrote:
> I do want to make clear that nothing I said in my feedback was 
> intended as an  attack on Scribus or its developers.  I was impressed 
> with what I was able to do with it, and with what my students were 
> able to do with it.  Yeah, the students complained a lot, but they 
> also did some pretty impressive things with the software.  Students 
> complain.  That's part of being a student. The experience wasn't 
> perfect, but it was worthwhile both for the students and for me.
>
What this also illustrates, and perhaps could be a side learning 
experience for students as they get introduced to open source software, 
is the citizenship involved in giving useful feedback to developers so 
they can fix and improve the software that fills a great need.

Many perceived glitches turn out to be inadvertent errors by the user, 
or unexpected behavior actually intended for a good reason by the 
developers. This list is a testimony to these misunderstandings.

Software isn't perfect, and this is not unique to open source -- I'm 
sure all of us who use Windows have many times gotten the message, "This 
program has caused an error and must be shut down" and we may send an 
error report, we may not, but do you ever get any feedback to explain or 
say that the problem was fixed?

So the reasonable questions from the Scribus team are (and I know the 
team will help me with this):
1. Which computer platform, which version of Scribus are you using?
2. What were the circumstances in which the problem occurred?
3. Is it reproducible?
4. Is there a particular file that seemed to cause the problem, and can 
you send it?
5. Were there any error messages?

Aside from helping yourself, you will receive gratitude from the 
developers for identifying problems they were not aware of, and not just 
a mindless "Thank you" from an automatic email answering program.
These are important lessons for students, not just about software and 
computers but life in general: 1) be nice, 2) don't bite the hand that 
feeds you, and 3) if you want help, it's a good idea to offer some yourself.

Greg