Re: [gnome-love] Hi, which way ?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 10:45:52AM +0200 or thereabouts, Aschwin van der Woude wrote:
> Hi Artiom,
>
> The Open Source development model works significantly different than
> development models used by most companies. There are off course
> similarities as well.
> Testing is done by the users themselves. Some of those users are
> developers, and might even help solving problems with the software.
> If you are interested in this model, you could start reading the books
> by Eric Raymond like 'Cathedral and the bazaar'.

I don't think that's the entire story. I know that Daniel Veillard
has a massive set of stuff for regression testing for libxml, and
I'm sure I've seen aty least starts on that kind of thing for
other modules.

I think possibly it's more interest (or lack of), knowledge, and
where to get the tools. I suspect those hackers who find docs 
boring probably find testing boring too :) 
 
> If you are interested in doing some testing, you are more than welcome
> to do so. Testing with tools like Valgrind will probably find some more
> problems in the various parts of Gnome.

I have had several emails from Julian Seward which I constantly
fail to forward onto more knowledge people (sorry, Julian!) in
which he has said that he would love to hear about places where
Valgrind can be made better for GNOME. Any places where it
doesn't work nicely are not deliberate but just a consequence
of his being less familiar with GNOME. 

Summarising what I remember of what he said, he was talking
about how he hoped it would be a good tool not only for "something
is broken, reach for debugging tool" (ie for valgrind) but also
for running routinely to find things that were broken anywhere
and working out what common errors were being made that could
be fixed all over the place.

I think :) 

I'll dig out the mails!

> Helping hands are always welcomed,

Definitely.

Telsa