[CREATE] Inkscape questions

[Yuval Levy]

On June 20, 2011 07:35:26 AM Cyrille Berger Skott wrote:
> Or maybe the first link is wrong, and it is not the tool that is the reason
> of the drop...

My experience with Hugin so far confirms the "drop", so I do not think the 
first link is wrong...


> Mark Shuttleworth is pursuing an agenda, and his blog is
> all about pushing his agenda.

... and I am not interested in politicking.


> the reallity is different and the inkscape team just cleaned up
> their bug database. Which is something they could have done in their
> previous bug reporting tool

AFAIK their previous bug database was Sourceforge, like ours.  I had tried for 
four years to bring up momentum there, and failed miserably no matter what 
technique I was throwing at it.  I tested multiple alternatives and found that  
Launchpad was the best solution for us based on measured timings.

I timed myself processing bugs.  Only triaging.  My peak speed on SF was 
6/hours.  On LP I was on average double as fast.  LP's peak speed can't be 
compared - with a single email I can close / clean up dozens of reports.

So I migrated Hugin's bug tracker to Launchpad, and we experienced the drop.  
But it seems to be a one-off and now the black hole is growing again.


> , but in my experience, such cleaning happen
> when there is a big momentum in the community such as a new release or a
> new tool.

I've worked actively to add momentum to Hugin.  The results over the past few 
years:
* speeded up the release cycles from barely one per year to three per year
* cleared the new features integration backlog from 2-3 years to 1-2 months
* attracted a following of builders/distributors for the different platforms
* attracted new features contribution (estimate about 50% from GSoC and 50% 
from the user's community)

The bug tracker is my only failure.  I have been working at it continuously 
since almost the beginning as I believe it is a critical tool.  I've tried 
plenty of things and while the current state is better than before,  I am 
afraid its future is not so bright and I am trying to learn from the Inkscape 
experience.

We have a fairly stable equilibrium on the development / distribution end 
despite some key people scaling back their contribution - i.e. our "succession 
plan" is far from perfect but not so bad after all.  But I am still worried 
about the bug tracker becoming stale again over time, and thus useless.

Yuv
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