How not to QA your Open Source project
by bear
I really did not want to write a post about this because I completely understand the how and why of what happened, but after 2 days of not having access to a service that I’ve come to rely on it is getting hard to be patient and quiet.
Two days ago the very popular and useful Identi.ca site was updated to version 0.9rc3 along with other Status.net sites. This is not the issue, Identi.ca has always been the proving ground for new features and as the open source arm of the project you have to expect some bugs.
What is the issue is that this release candidate (that is what the “rc” part of 0.9rc3 means) contained a lot of new code to deal with how the internal queues are managed.
Let me repeat that:
a release candidate contained new code that was not a simple bug fix
So now the entire XMPP stream has been taken offline to deal with the integration issues between the code and their XMPP server.
Come on guys, surely you have a QA and/or DevTest server? Why the hell are you continuing to introduce new code into release candidates.
Oh, and why don’t you just rollback the change?
And yes, before I get flamed and yelled at that “It is free so you have no right to complain” let me point out that if they offered a pay version, I would pay. Also since they have custom users and, I believe, even corporate installs, they should have better QA. It really is that simple.