[Geoserver-devel] Is there any practical way to prioritize regressions?

GeoServer GeoServer Developer
1

From a users perspective, there is nothing more annoying than regressions surely. You salivate about the new features available in the new release but you are stuck in time warp because nobody has the time to fix a regression. We lived with 2.1.3 for seemed like forever till the SLD regression was fixed and are now stuck by another regression. (GEOS-5738)

With limited volunteer effort and the fact that new features are more exciting than fixing other people bugs, it is easy to understand but that doesnt relieve user frustration. Furthermore, its easier to scrape together budget for a new feature than to convince powers to pay for a fix. Would blocking a new major release till regressions are cleared help in focussing volunteer effort?

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2

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 4:26 AM, Phil Scadden <p.scadden@anonymised.com> wrote:

From a users perspective, there is nothing more annoying than
regressions surely. You salivate about the new features available in the
new release but you are stuck in time warp because nobody has the time
to fix a regression. We lived with 2.1.3 for seemed like forever till
the SLD regression was fixed and are now stuck by another regression.
(GEOS-5738)

With limited volunteer effort and the fact that new features are more
exciting than fixing other people bugs, it is easy to understand but
that doesnt relieve user frustration. Furthermore, its easier to scrape
together budget for a new feature than to convince powers to pay for a
fix. Would blocking a new major release till regressions are cleared
help in focussing volunteer effort?

Nope, it would just stop the release indefinitely.

I cannot talk about others, but as far as I'm concerned, it's not about
exciting, it's about not having time at all.
During the week I'm booked solid with paid work, during the weekend I
mostly review pull requests and
try to apply them, or try to apply patches contained in jira.

Talking about exciting, I developed a transforming data store that allows
to rename fields and create
new fields out of existing ones, that happened one year ago. Can you
believe that in the last year
I could not find time to start thinking about integrating it in the
GeoServer, because every week is the
same story, work first, review and merge patches later? One year, and I
could not find the time, in my spare
time, to hack on a topic that I'd love to work against.

I believe other devs are in a situation similar to mine, with the exception
that I don't see them working
over the weekend (which is totally fair, the weekend is supposed to be used
for resting and having a life,
if a fool like me decides to thrash half of it trying to push the project
forward it's his/her choice).

Cheers
Andrea

--

GeoServer training in Milan, 6th & 7th June 2013! Visit
http://geoserver.geo-solutions.it for more information.

Ing. Andrea Aime
@geowolf
Technical Lead

GeoSolutions S.A.S.
Via Poggio alle Viti 1187
55054 Massarosa (LU)
Italy
phone: +39 0584 962313
fax: +39 0584 1660272
mob: +39 339 8844549

http://www.geo-solutions.it
http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it

-------------------------------------------------------

3

Well I appreciate the position but it makes for a difficult for users. Most OS communities that I have been involved in prioritize regressions but the geoserver/geotools set up is different. The contracted extensions to geoserver/geotools functionality make it great actually that functionality. On volunteer effort, it would never happen or only very slowly. On the other hand, the need to contracted-for stuff in geoserver also seems to force a "damn the torpedoes - full steam ahead".

The only way forward that I can see would be change to its funding model - making it more like say Sencha's Extjs. At some level, it is free, but some big incentives to subscribe beyond just support. To get more money for fixing stuff, there is a need to make buying a subscription more attractive to company budget rounds. When something is available for free, and works at a particular version, the budget justification needs something valuable to the business that cant be got for free. Maybe if Geosolution had a paid-for only version of Geoserver/geotools that was always the real release version and fully supported, while previous version was still free? This is would massive change to development model and structure but would it be worth it if led to more resources for fixing bugs? I'd +1 but I am conspicuously not contributing the code.

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4

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 3:37 AM, Phil Scadden <p.scadden@anonymised.com> wrote:

The only way forward that I can see would be change to its funding model
- making it more like say Sencha's Extjs. At some level, it is free, but
some big incentives to subscribe beyond just support. To get more money
for fixing stuff, there is a need to make buying a subscription more
attractive to company budget rounds. When something is available for
free, and works at a particular version, the budget justification needs
something valuable to the business that cant be got for free. Maybe if
Geosolution had a paid-for only version of Geoserver/geotools that was
always the real release version and fully supported, while previous
version was still free?

This would require a dual licence setup, and a project that is managed by
a single company.
Don't know about you, but I run screaming when I see a fake open source
project like that.
Besides, we already have a company building a product around GeoServer,
and a handful of open source projects that include GeoServer as a component:
do you see that helping much with bug fixing?

What we really need imho is more developers keeping an eye on jira and
try to solve issues found there (or help review pull requests).
With GitHub pull requests we get a lot of external contribution, actually
quite a bit
more than with the old model of people attaching a patch to jira, which
makes GeoServer one of the Ohloh projects with most contributors
(https://www.ohloh.net/p/geoserver/factoids#FactoidTeamSizeVeryLarge),
but if you look at it, most people make 1-3 pull requests and then
disappear,
they don't really dive in and try to help with the ever growing amount of
tickets.

Also, it's hard to tell companies to change their business model when
the only real problem they have is that they don't manage to hire fast
enough.

Anyways, the discussion is likely going to end nowhere, and I prefer being
practical instead.
I promise I'll try to pay more attention to bug reports of users that help
writing
the documentation. Mind, there will be a proportion too, I won't try to
solve
a bug that takes 3 days of work for half a page of docs, and regardless of
the
effort, I won't spend any money installing proprietary software that might
be
required to reproduce and fix the issue.

Might not be what you wanted, but if you want other people to spend effort,
it's good practice to show yours first.

Cheers
Andrea

--

GeoServer training in Milan, 6th & 7th June 2013! Visit
http://geoserver.geo-solutions.it for more information.

Ing. Andrea Aime
@geowolf
Technical Lead

GeoSolutions S.A.S.
Via Poggio alle Viti 1187
55054 Massarosa (LU)
Italy
phone: +39 0584 962313
fax: +39 0584 1660272
mob: +39 339 8844549

http://www.geo-solutions.it
http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it

-------------------------------------------------------

5

Might not be what you wanted, but if you want other people to spend effort,
it's good practice to show yours first.

Andrea, like you I only have so much time as well and only so many things I can commit to. The other way to help I thought would be convincing my company to cough up money for more development and I am trying to address a way in which that might happen. I understand perfectly the need for more contribution. However, the focus of my complaint was not around the general area of fixing bugs, but specifically in fixing regressions. You wanted a user perspective in geoserver-devel, and from this users point of view, regressions are major bug bear. I'm used to regressions being blockers and I was trying to find a ways in which this could be addressed. I certainly dont think you should be the person however lumped with fixing an arcSDE Geotools bug. Its not impossible that I might find some time, - I at least have arcSDE - but its an unfamiliar world to me.

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6

Hi Phil,

When something is available for
free, and works at a particular version, the budget justification needs
something valuable to the business that cant be got for free.

I slightly disagree here - corporations, at least the conservative ones, like having paid support for things. It makes management happy, they get someone to blame when it goes wrong. Doesn’t even have to be good support - over half of our support is rubbish or worse (I wish I was exaggerating), but we pay a fortune for it anyway.

With that in mind, plus because we had a little budget and a few things we wanted fixing, I had the powers that be pay for GeoServer support from a commercial provider. There are plenty out there to choose from, and so far we’re very happy with what we’ve got. For bonus points, the entire community gains rather than just some shareholders somewhere. We’ve had several JIRA’s fixed like this, and support is actually quite cheap - you might want to consider that for getting 5738 or other important bugs resolved.

I think the people who use it as “its free” and don’t pay for support aren’t using it in a mission-critical application. They’re unlikely to ever pay.

Jonathan

On 15 May 2013 02:37, Phil Scadden <p.scadden@anonymised.com> wrote:

Well I appreciate the position but it makes for a difficult for users.
Most OS communities that I have been involved in prioritize regressions
but the geoserver/geotools set up is different. The contracted
extensions to geoserver/geotools functionality make it great actually
that functionality. On volunteer effort, it would never happen or only
very slowly. On the other hand, the need to contracted-for stuff in
geoserver also seems to force a “damn the torpedoes - full steam ahead”.

The only way forward that I can see would be change to its funding model

  • making it more like say Sencha’s Extjs. At some level, it is free, but
    some big incentives to subscribe beyond just support. To get more money
    for fixing stuff, there is a need to make buying a subscription more
    attractive to company budget rounds. When something is available for
    free, and works at a particular version, the budget justification needs
    something valuable to the business that cant be got for free. Maybe if
    Geosolution had a paid-for only version of Geoserver/geotools that was
    always the real release version and fully supported, while previous
    version was still free? This is would massive change to development
    model and structure but would it be worth it if led to more resources
    for fixing bugs? I’d +1 but I am conspicuously not contributing the code.

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7

>I think the people who use it as "its free" and don't pay for support aren't using it in a mission-critical application. They're unlikely to ever pay.

Well we managed to get one bug paid for and I have hopes of getting support. Our problem is more on internal politics. We have arcGISServer and obviously pay through the nose for it. My motivation for using Geoserver isnt that it is open source or free, but because I consider it the best product for the job. I'd drop it tomorrow if arcGISServer or other would deliver what I want. As it stands, Geoserver just has too many good extensions, ticks the standards boxes, and most importantly, performs. However, when you are paying for ESRI, its a lot harder to get management to cough on an alternative. Especially when the other is free. We have sell on basis of what else it can do and performance.

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