[scribus] Announce: Scribus 1.4.0 RC6 Release

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Peter Nermander wrote:

> And of course, if you are forced to downgrade, you can always ask for
> a refund... wait? Is Scribus free? Oh, sorry...

Peter,

I find this kind of attitude highly questionable. Not being paid to do
something is a really bad excuse for lousy development and releasing
practice. (Likewise parents are not exactly paid to raise kids, but
they tend to approach this subject professionally; but I digress.)
Simply put, this is not how you reach perfection.

The "release notes" for RC6 doesn't mention this regression (or
behaviour change -- we don't know which one it is yet). Typically it
means one of the three things:

1. Developers didn't know this happened. Which means they didn't test it.
2. Developers knew about it and thought it wasn't a big deal. Which
means a communication issue.
3. The person who cooked up the list of changes forgot about it.

I can live with the latter, but the first two indicate a serious
problem in the project.

If developers didn't know about this change and didn't test for it,
then the question is whether Scribus has automatic regression tests,
and if it doesn't, then wouldn't it make a perfect candidate for the
next GSoC?

If developers knew about it and thought it was a non-issue, then I'd
rather shut up, because there are no nice words you can say in
presence of juniors that I can think of in this case.

The crazy approach to versioning as well as turbulent development
efforts in the past 4 years have resulted in extensive use of unstable
versions in production which has a reasonable justification by users:
they want to make layouts and typesetting that doesn't suck.
Fortunately the crazy period seems to be ending, but I'm still unsure
what impact on adoption of Scribus by users could this kind of
attitude (we broke it between minor versions and didn't warn you,
because we are not perfect) have.

P.S. Speaking of file formats, i've been following recent developments
in CSS3 with great interest (basically, Adobe and other folks are
trying to bring better typography and bits of classic DTP layouting to
the web/tablets) and I wonder if a new, more stable file format could
be built on top of that.

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org