[josm-dev] JOSM-Tested

[Russ Nelson]

Dirk Stöcker writes:
 > Everything you tell in your mail tells me several things:
 > a) You have absolutely no knowledge of JOSM release process

There IS NO RELEASE PROCESS.  That's what I'm trying to tell you.  You
don't do releases.  You just bless SVN versions.  Where's the
changelog?  How do people know if they should upgrade or not (I know,
I know, everybody should ALWAYS upgrade -- that's just a way of saying
"screw you, users, we don't support yesterday's version").  Where's
the buglist?

And more to the point of this thread, where are the translations?  You
can't do translations when you're constantly changing the code out
from translator's feet.

Today's startup notes are a perfect example:

"Active version '3280 SVN' should be updated! The current stable
snapshot is 3329 and 3329 is the unstable development version."

Users don't want to be your test monkeys!  They don't.  They really
really really really really don't.  I've seen this my entire
professional career, and I saw it when I was a Cloudmade Community
Ambassador.

 > b) You have no knowledge of different development models and OpenSource.
 > c) You have no knowledge of motivation.

Interesting that you should say that, because this is how everybody
does it in my experience.  That's the way every project I've
participated in (e.g. gpsd) does it.  That's the way I've always run
my open source projects, and my users love it.  Google for "russ
nelson".  JOSM is very much the outlier.

 > Contrary to you I don't know what's right or wrong, I only know what works 
 > or not and JOSM works - it is actively developed and used.

Okay ... when you say "apt-get install josm" on Ubuntu, what version
of JOSM do you get?  <---- This is a big can of FAIL.  I can't
conceive of any software development model in which this isn't FAIL.

 > I don't like flames like the letter you wrote and probably I should have 
 > ignored it as I usually try to do, but sometimes I can't, especially as 
 > currently I'm responsible for JOSM development, so your flames were 
 > directed at me personally.

I'm not flaming anybody.  I'm merely pointing out that JOSM doesn't do
releases.  This is very easy for developers, and very hard for users.

 > BTW: I miss the massive work on JOSM you did to improve the situation.

There is no point in making a contribution which the developers
reject.  Been there, done that, it's a FWOMPT.  If you guys don't want
to do releases, I can't force you.

-- 
--my blog is at    http://blog.russnelson.com
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