Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 at 9:42 am by shura

There should be on the order of a week between now and the 2.0.0 release. The progress in adding features, improving usability, and fixing problems has been steady. However, with a small team of volunteers, it is simply unrealistic to test all the features with all weird data combinations for a large package like GRAMPS.

We need this release to get an order of magnitude larger exposure for the 2.0.x series. This will definitely uncover bugs that we have not seen yet, leading in turn to fixing and improving, and, eventually, to a next version, better and faster and more usable. A normal Free Software process to which we should be used for a long time now.

The only thing that troubles me this time is that the 2.0.x tree has not seen wide user testing ever since it was branched from the 1.0.0. The stable tree has evolved incrementally, fixing problems here and there. This has resulted in a very stable 1.0.11, but also likely created similar stability expectations for the 2.0.x tree.

It is only a matter of a day or two after the release until we start getting feedback from the offended users. Something along the lines of “I fell for upgrading to 2.0 and now my data looks like crap” or “This version is way worse than 1.0.11”, or somesuch. I guess it is inevitable, but my hope is that we can fix a lot of things quickly and then get 2.0.1 out as soon as possible. The irony is that in almost all regards the 2.0.x is wa-a-a-y better than 1.0.x tree could ever get. Hopefully, our users will have some patience to bear with the process and to see through the transient problems 🙂