[Libreoffice-qa] Question of the use of 'Fresh' rather than 'Beta' and support for XP

[Jay Philips]

Hi Michael,

On 05/05/2014 02:37 PM, Michael Meeks wrote:
> Hi Jay,
>
> 	I think you're confused by the naming. Currently we have these
> releases:
>
> 	4.3 (master) - Beta
> 	4.2 - Fresh
> 	4.1 - Stable
>
> 	As/when we release 4.3.0 those will rotate I imagine:
>
> 	master
> 	4.3 - Fresh
> 	4.2 - Stable
>
> 	etc. =) it's like climbing up a ladder I guess.
>
> 	All of this is essentially propagating some sort of pyramid scheme on
> ourselves. The sad reality of life is that there is no substitute for
> getting a few million people to test the code and file bugs. Despite our
> significant investments in automated QA etc. we are still unaware of
> lots of bugs until we release the latest 'Fresh' release - and then
> (over some months) we make it more stable based on user feedback until
> we tag that as 'Stable' and move on.

Yes initially i was confused as i was used to seeing chrome's labelling 
there releases as development, beta and stable.I think it would be great 
if the website would provide better explanation on the download pages of 
what each of the versions was for so that users would understand what 
they were downloading. Also think that the download page would be a 
great location to encourage users to submit bugs.

I think it is great that we get more users to test the code, but 
unfortunately a large percentage of these users have never filed a bug 
before and will likely not do so, even if they encountered one. I 
believe that if we wish to encourage users to submit bugs to LibO, then 
we need to have bug reporting more visible in the UI, like a bug icon in 
the app toolbar similar to the help icon, maybe a crash report dialog 
that appears after LibO crashes (like KDE), maybe a bug report button 
next to 'Help' and 'Extensions' in the main UI, and possibly an initial 
bug report request visible to users when they first run LibO. I think 
more bug reports could be filed if there was a bug report form/dialog 
was added to LibO from which users could send in an initial bug report. 
Something as simple as the current bug report page found in LibO's 
website < https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/bug/ >, or possibly 
taking that form and embedding it into form/dialog.

> 	Of course - this situation is helped by people (such as yourself) doing
> more testing on 4.3 / master - something we like to encourage.

I believe i would have done testing on 4.3 from when i started my docx 
testing if it had found it on the development versions page < 
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/ > which unfortunately 
it is still not listed under even though it has been available in the 
pre-release folder since the 20th of april.

>> With the recent talk about 4.3 not working on windows XP
> 	It doesn't ? then we should fix that - it's a bug. There are currently
> no plans to drop Windows XP support that I'm aware of. As you say it is
> an important platform.

Yes there is a bug in LibO running on windows xp which was being 
discussed in the mailing list these last few days (bug 77891).Glad to 
hear that there are no current plans to stop supporting XP.

> 	ATB,
>
> 		Michael.
>