MozillaZine

Forums Down

Friday December 14th, 2001

As you may have noticed, we've taken the forums down, as we are hitting our bandwidth limit with them. We're working on getting them up and running again as soon as possible.

In related news, we've added a link to our Cafe Press store where you can get cool MozillaZine appearal, which will help us keep ads off the site for good. Thanks for all your support.

UPDATE: Many people have requested some way of donating money to help us out, so we have setup a paypal account for you to do so. Simply go to paypal.com and use the email address jason@mozillazine.org to contribute. We thank you greatly for all the help, and thank the people who bought stuff at CafePress for the support as well.

Jason.

#1 Cafe Press store

by broken

Friday December 14th, 2001 1:05 PM

The stocking pic link seems to be broken.

#2 Just bought gray t-shirt

by johnlar

Friday December 14th, 2001 1:14 PM

Just bought the gray t-shit "futured." Freaken hallarious.

#7 Re: Just bought gray t-shirt

by tny

Friday December 14th, 2001 3:03 PM

Here too. Perhaps another t-shirt would sell: RESOLVED on the front, WONTFIX on the back.

#10 Re: Just bought gray t-shirt

by gerbilpower

Friday December 14th, 2001 6:36 PM

ROFL, I'm getting this too, compliments nicely with my other geek shirt: http://www.copyleft.net/item.phtml?&page=product_502_front.phtml

Alex

#11 Re: Re: Just bought gray t-shirt

by bulbul

Friday December 14th, 2001 7:50 PM

¡I love it! I notice that they have a <head> cap as well.

#3 Store

by WillyWonka

Friday December 14th, 2001 1:40 PM

I must say, the only items which I would buy are the hat and the futured t-shirt (but no one else would really understand it).

How many people are going to buy that mug... really? I sure hope those were photoshop jobs too. :)

#18 Re: Store

by DavidGerard

Sunday December 16th, 2001 12:53 AM

<<How many people are going to buy that mug... really?>>

Anyone who's used a build in the last month since the XUL cleanup? Argh, the dry rot it's brought to the surface ...

#4 Chatty Mozilla fan hits

by ckjnigel

Friday December 14th, 2001 2:44 PM

Demand exceeding bandwidth suggests a lot of people care a lot about Mozilla and like talking about it. Are there any measurements of "hits" ?

#5 buy stuff!

by wolfseyn

Friday December 14th, 2001 2:46 PM

I don\'t want to see any ads here! BUY STUFF, please!

#6 Re: buy stuff!

by WillyWonka

Friday December 14th, 2001 2:49 PM

Just block the ads ;)

#16 Wouldn't mind seeing ads.

by rcmoz

Saturday December 15th, 2001 3:26 PM

Just make 'em funny, like the thinkgeek ones on slashdot.

#8 why not set up PayPal account?

by bulbul

Friday December 14th, 2001 3:09 PM

Okay, so i bought a tote bag. With postage that came to over $20. Why not also have a PayPal account for donations. I would much rather have my $20 go straight to MozillaZine.

#9 Bandwidth

by SubtleRebel

Friday December 14th, 2001 4:25 PM

How much bandwidth are you being allocated?

Perhaps another hosting solution would be better?

#12 Rating

by Tanyel

Friday December 14th, 2001 8:30 PM

The main attraction of the forums for me was the Build Bar forum's tendency to be much more accurate than the "thumbs up" graphic in assessing a nightly build. While the forums are not working, I think it would be good to implement a feature that would allow people to vote on whether the nightly builds are worth downloading. This is not as good as the forum but it would be better than the "thumbs up."

#15 Re: Rating

by strauss

Saturday December 15th, 2001 11:45 AM

I also found a great more detailed information on build status there, and it made me think I have been too positive about the forward progress of Mozilla. An application where major features (preferences, forward/back, page search, etc.) are dropping in and out on a nightly basis is barely even early alpha, certainly not late beta. The instability appears to be more severe than I had previously realized, and there seems to be a great need for increased checkin discipline, as well as a critical need for root-cause analysis.

#17 You can already do this

by rcmoz

Saturday December 15th, 2001 3:28 PM

You can already vote on build status at http://www.mozillanews.org

Good luck registering though -- I registered a month ago and still haven't received my confirmation email.

#20 Re: Re: Rating

by TommyBee

Sunday December 16th, 2001 9:48 AM

Keep in mind that not every program is available on the daily basis as Mozilla is. I'm sure that in the development process many programs have prominent features broken by new changes -- we just don't get to SEE them because most companies don't release their programs in such a way. I do agree, though, that modificiations need to be evaluated THOROUGHLY before being checked in.

Another thing -- you? Too positive? ;-)

#22 Re: Re: Re: Rating

by strauss

Sunday December 16th, 2001 11:59 AM

> Keep in mind that not every program is available on the daily basis as Mozilla is. > I'm sure that in the development process many programs have prominent features > broken by new changes -- we just don't get to SEE them because most companies > don't release their programs in such a way.

I'm going on the basis of my own professional experience over the last twenty years, which has included many years of experience in alpha and beta cycles of software with nightly builds. If major features are dropping in and out on a nightly basis, you're nowhere near the stability that will be required to ship the software. It's characteristic of pre-alpha or early-to-mid-alpha software. Beta software needs to be highly solid -- very few changes should cause regressions. Instead, Mozilla experiences changes that cause major regressions every two or three days at the most. That means current schedule estimates which predict only about another four months in beta are probably optimistic, since alpha is stretching over more than a year, and that some process changes will be required in order to get this very complex system to market at all.

> I do agree, though, that modificiations need to be evaluated THOROUGHLY before being checked in.

Which, of course, is very hard to do for software with such a huge feature set. Developers don't have time to check each of a hundred web pages and a hundred user-accessible features for every change. This is where automatic testing could become critical. Changes could be made on a submission basis, and then run through automatic testing before being approved for checkin. Of course, this itself will take time and money -- there would need to be a fairly large server farm, or else the automatic testing would become a process bottleneck, and creation of the automated tests would be labor-intensive. But without it, the software may never attain stability.

> Another thing -- you? Too positive? ;-)

Sometimes, yes. I was recently quite conciliatory on the issue of the software having made a lot of progress, based on my use of the 0.9.6 milestone build, and I was willing to go along with Asa on the issue of forward progress being constant. When people in the forums started observing, almost unanimously, that the builds had been crap for weeks, then I realized I was being overly positive. Mozilla seems to take one step back for every two steps forward, and the ratio may be worse than that. Destabilizing changes that set back the program for weeks still seem to happen once or twice a month, and there's no apparent end in sight to these "crash landings." That's not really a recipe for forward progress.

Again, please bear in mind that I am noting these risks and raising these issues because I think mitigating the risks and addressing the issues is critical to the success of this program. It is unfortunate that some people seem to be able to see expressed concerns and potential solutions only as nay-saying. This sort of feedback is critical to the success of any large software program. Cheerleading approaches that casually dismiss concerns and risks lead to massive crash-and-burns like Apple's Copland -- which during its late builds, was in a similar state of stability as Mozilla is today.

#36 Re: Re: Re: Re: Rating

by TommyBee

Monday December 17th, 2001 7:15 PM

I have to admit that I don't have much knowledge of what goes on in real-life software development. (I just finished my fifth semester towards my bachelor's degree in Computer Science.) I do wish that Mozilla would get to the point that I could download a nightly and not worry about base functionality problems. However, I'm afraid that's the nature of an open-source beast -- people offer "fixes" that end up breaking things beyond what they see in their testing.

I'm sorry if my comments have in any way appeared an attempt to dismiss your opinions. It's important that there are people who are willing to call a spade a spade, perhaps bringing things to our attention that we might be unwilling to see without prodding.

#21 Re: Re: Rating

by niner

Sunday December 16th, 2001 10:15 AM

Strauss could you please clarify a question for me? Please don't take it as an offence, but when did you test your last Mozilla build? You're posting acutally pretty much about Mozilla but sometimes I get the feeling that you didn't even test it for yourself.

That checkins should be tested before is clear. But how far? The nightlies are just for testing the builds of that day, so you could say that checkins are tested very much before the release of the Milestone testbuilds. I would see this as a normal open source development process. The developers make their patches, test them, they get reviewed and finally checked in to be tested very thoroughly by the Mozilla QA community (the one's actually using the browser and reporting problems).

Of course this differs from traditional closed source development where the public would never see such builds, but so they ain't tested as thoroughly as for example Mozilla. I'm pretty sure when 1.0 arrives there won't be many very critical bugs which weren't reported before unlike many closed source projects.

#23 Re: Re: Re: Rating

by i5mast

Sunday December 16th, 2001 2:40 PM

> I'm pretty sure when 1.0 arrives there won't be many very critical > bugs which weren't reported before unlike many closed source > projects. on thing worries me though. it's that the bug count doesn't decrease :( i've seen some posts saying that mozilla team fixes 1000-1500 bugs in every milestone, but i guess most of these bugs are regressions.

i like the latest nightly builds on my laptop :)

#30 Re: Re: Rating

by SubtleRebel

Monday December 17th, 2001 10:44 AM

You indicate that your opinion of the progress of Mozilla was signifigantly influenced by discussions in the build bar forum. You draw the conclusion that "The instability appears to be more severe than I had previously realized..." by reading some posts in a forum that was created for the purpose of discussing stability/instability in the nightly builds.

It sounds as if you are basing your speculation on whatever "insight" you can derive from the forum rather than personally running the nightlies on a regular basis. Yet you seem to think that your analysis of Mozilla progress is somehow more accurate than people who are intimately involved with Mozilla on a daily basis.

Perhaps this lack of first hand experience explains why you constantly try to use bogus statistics and irrelevant buzz words to try to defend your position.

You have frequently suggested a need for root cause analysis, but you have never to my knowledge explained what you think it would accomplish. Root cause analysis of the Mozilla project would have to presume that there are flaws in the organization and development processes that are causing the alledged problems that you whine about. Considering the unique nature of the project and the resources available to it, I do not believe that these alledged problems are valid and therefore root cause analysis would be pointless. If you honestly think it would be beneficial, please explain what specific issues would be solved by root cause analysis.

BTW, nightly builds are part of the live debugging process and thus are not expected to be stable on a regular basis. In case you had not noticed, Mozilla is not structured like your typical development project. Although all code is tested before being checked in, Mozilla does not have the resources to exhaustive test of the code before before checking it in and thus we have the process whereby anyone who wants to help can test the daily builds. So what you are seeing in the build bar forum is a planned part of the debug process.

#33 Re: Re: Re: Rating

by strauss

Monday December 17th, 2001 1:52 PM

> Yet you seem to think that your analysis of Mozilla progress is somehow more accurate than people who are intimately involved with Mozilla on a daily basis.

Nope, I'm basing my conclusions very closely on tyhe reports of people who do run the nightly builds. They report that the nightlies have been extremely unstable all month, and almost every day, they have reported major features dropping in and out. I'm very familiar from my software development career with what that means about the overall stability of a project.

As for you, I'm getting more and more sure that the loudest advocates of the Mozilla open source process have never before been involved with shipping a large software project, and do not have the background or training to understand what they are seeing.

> You have frequently suggested a need for root cause analysis, but you have never to my knowledge explained what you think it would accomplish.

Root cause analysis is a standard quality technique which applies equally well to any project, and is not confined to software. It is an attempt to analyze problems to find out which components of the overall system they have in common. Once a set of data on problems is built up, it becomes possible to find through statistical methods which components are tending to cause the most problems. The reasons for the instability caused by that component can then be analyzed in detail by QA engineers, and they can formulate proposals for changes to prevent or minimize further problems from that component.

> BTW, nightly builds are part of the live debugging process and thus are not expected to be stable on a regular basis.

Again, that's just not how it works. If new checkins break existing features on a regular basis, there's a serious problem with system fragility. A system of this type will probably never achieve the stability needed to ship. The problem can't be solved piecemeal by fixing more bugs, since every bug fix carries with it a large probability of creating a new problem. Fragility has to be solved on a system level.

#34 strauss?

by zevious

Monday December 17th, 2001 2:51 PM

I still continue to wonder WHY you come here? Just go use IE and be happy.

For the record, I am not a developer or involved with the Mozilla code. I use the nightlies on a daily basis, sometimes downloading 2 or 3 versions as the day progresses. I report any bugs I find and have suggested a few new features. I have been doing this for 8 or 9 months. I have stopped using Netscape 4.79 with the exception of mail. (If I had more time, I'd switch over to the mail client of Mozilla as well.)

With each new version, this browser suite has become better and better. This is not to say that things haven't been broken at one point or another. The latest nightlies, under Windows at the very least, are fast, stable and work. I have very few complaints about it at this point. Have you tried them?

As for your insistance that the product will never "ship", a product HAS shipped. Netscape 6.2.1 is a very usable product for many people. The next versions released by Netscape will be even better. Mozilla 1.0 will make it to existance at some point in time. It won't meet your timeframe, since it appears that there is only ONE way a project such as this can be run (like you would with your years of experience) and Mozilla isn't being run that way.

In conclusion, my question is the same: Why do you come here? Why not go use IE or (using your wonderful company and it's superior beta management) build a better product yourself?

#41 Opinions

by SubtleRebel

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 8:35 AM

>Nope, I'm basing my conclusions very closely on tyhe reports of people who do run the nightly builds. They report that the nightlies have been extremely unstable all month, and almost every day, they have reported major features dropping in and out. I'm very familiar from my software development career with what that means about the overall stability of a project.

So, as I said, your criticism is not based on first hand experience. Instead you are jumping to conclusions based on comments posted by people discussing problems. At the same time, you choose to dismiss positive comments about the builds. How can this possibly be an accurate view of the project?

I am curious whether or not you think that the people reporting the problems with the builds agree with your conclusions about the stability and progress of the Mozilla project.

A parallel : I went to the movie theater last Saturday. I could write a few pages about all of the things that were wrong with the movie that I saw. Regardless of their previous movie going experience, someone who had never seen the movie might read those pages and conclude that the movie sucked, but that person would be wrong. I saw the movie and despite its flaws, it was one of the best movies in its genre to come out in a while.

#42 Experience

by SubtleRebel

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 9:20 AM

>As for you, I'm getting more and more sure that the loudest advocates of the Mozilla open source process have never before been involved with shipping a large software project, and do not have the background or training to understand what they are seeing.

I have plenty of experience with large software projects. My background and training also enable me to understand that a large scale closed source projects are very different from a large scale open source project like Mozilla.

In most closed source projects, a set team of programmers is assigned to each component. They may build and test their components on a daily basis, but builds of the whole project are not typically done that often. When large projects builds are done, it is not unusual for whole components to be left out because those components are unstable or even completely non-functional due to recent code checkins. I have seen these incomplete builds only a few days before final canidate builds. Crashes and regressions caused by checking in new code happen with all large scale projects -- it is just more obvious with Mozilla because we have access to full builds after every code checkin.

#43 Root cause analysis

by SubtleRebel

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 9:45 AM

>Root cause analysis is a standard quality technique which applies equally well to any project, and is not confined to software. It is an attempt to analyze problems to find out which components of the overall system they have in common. Once a set of data on problems is built up, it becomes possible to find through statistical methods which components are tending to cause the most problems. The reasons for the instability caused by that component can then be analyzed in detail by QA engineers, and they can formulate proposals for changes to prevent or minimize further problems from that component.

You have still failed to explain what you think it would accomplish regarding Mozilla.

I never said that I did not understand what root cause analysis was, nor have I ever questioned the general usefullness of the process, but what I did say is that I do not think it would result in any signifigant improvement in the project.

You seem to have a problem with the whole open source development process. If you were to do a root cause analysis of Mozilla, I think you would conclude that the procedures need to be more like a closed source development project, but that just is not practical for an open source project with such distributed development and resources.

#13 Voting

by IriseLenoir

Friday December 14th, 2001 10:12 PM

A voting system that alows users to rate builds is a very good idea, and should be implemented even when the forums are back. There is such a thing on mozillanews.org http://www.mozillanews.org/ but since there is not many readers there, it's kinda useless.

#14 Hmm, slahdot ehm.. mozillazine effect...

by turi

Saturday December 15th, 2001 7:30 AM

Is the image server of cafepress.com down because of the heavy load generated from mozillazine users?

#24 Re: Hmm, slahdot ehm.. mozillazine effect...

by macpeep

Sunday December 16th, 2001 2:51 PM

"Is the image server of cafepress.com down because of the heavy load generated from mozillazine users?"

I think you drastically over estimate the amount of mozillaZine users and load generated by them. The company I work for was featured in a Slashdot article - and linked to - a few weeks ago and our old P2 Linux box that hasn't been booted for just short of a year handled the load just fine. That was Slashdot front page. I doubt mozillaZine has even 1% of the amount of users Slashdot has so the impact of something like this should be absolutely minimal.

#19 Mozilla store

by macpeep

Sunday December 16th, 2001 7:08 AM

I noticed the "Store" link here and was dissapointed to find that there was no Mozilla stuff that you could buy. I can imagine that a LOT of people would love to have Mozilla t-shirts or coffee mugs! I know I'd buy that if it was available! Not only could it be a source of income but it would also be free PR for Mozilla since the brand would be much more visible that way. Since there already is a MozillaZine store, it could be convenient to put the Mozilla stuff on sale there. What do you guys think?

#25 Re: Mozilla store

by TonyG

Monday December 17th, 2001 4:33 AM

Pah. Don't be silly. Mozilla? Marketing? Advertising? Self-promotion?

Next you'll be saying they want more than 2% of the internet using public to use it.

<sarcasm ends>

Be great to get a Mozilla tee shirt. Those old soviet style images are always cool. I still have a Netscape mug and an old tee shirt with the little green guy on it.

#26 Re: Re: Mozilla store

by macpeep

Monday December 17th, 2001 4:57 AM

I ordered an Netscape fleece jacket some years ago.. It rocked but was a little too small. :( I should have gotten an L instead of an M. I gave it to a 2nd hand collection a while back. Some lucky dude in a 3rd world country is now walking around in a Netscape jacket, not even realizing what it is. :) I don't think you can get those anymore.. Too bad.

#28 Re: Re: Re: Mozilla store

by Tanyel

Monday December 17th, 2001 8:50 AM

Maybe we can create a project to develop a new Netscape jacket. It may be flawed and require years of development but it will not be too small because it will grow and grow until it is the biggest jacket ever. Maybe we can add chat features and other things not necessary in a jacket. Maybe we can make something that can be used to form any article of clothing anybody could want. Then we can add themes so people can make our jacket look like other peoples' jackets. People may criticize us at sites like jacketquest.com but we can retaliate at jacketquestquest.com. If we are unable to turn our article into an actual jacket then we can just call it a beta version and sell the jacket to AOL.

#29 Re: Re: Re: Re: Mozilla store

by macpeep

Monday December 17th, 2001 9:17 AM

Dammit, this kind of stuff is totally normal when making jackets. Buttons fall on and off on a daily basis, pockets have holes and the seams are out of alignment. It's perfectly normal and who the hell do you think you are to complain about it?

Seriously though, are you having a bad day? :)

#35 Re: Re: Re: Re: Mozilla store

by dave532

Monday December 17th, 2001 3:21 PM

lol, great one Tanyel :)

#27 Mozilla store.

by johnlar

Monday December 17th, 2001 8:34 AM

There is a mozilla store. http://www.cafepress.com/mozilla/ I don't know if profits goto mozilla or not. If not I'm sure mozilla could sue.

#31 why not set up PayPal account?

by bulbul

Monday December 17th, 2001 1:02 PM

Okay, so i bought a tote bag. With postage that came to over $20. Why not also have a PayPal account for donations. I would much rather have my $20 go straight to MozillaZine.

#32 why not set up PayPal account?

by bulbul

Monday December 17th, 2001 1:02 PM

Okay, so i bought a tote bag. With postage that came to over $20. Why not also have a PayPal account for donations. I would much rather have my $20 go straight to MozillaZine.

#37 Re: why not set up PayPal account?

by witbrock

Monday December 17th, 2001 8:03 PM

Now that there's a pay pal account, how about a way of keeping track of whether we've donated enough in a month to pay for the bandwidth, etc (one of those strange thermometer things, perhaps).

#38 Strauss-bashers... can we chill just a bit?

by rickst29

Monday December 17th, 2001 11:25 PM

I don\'t think it is Mozilla\'s interest to recommend that interested people with thought provoking questions should go away (and/or use IE). I personally agree with comments on both sides of the question:

1) Strauss is correct in recommending a statistical analysis to find if new problems are being exposed within particular \"old\" objects/functions at a higher than other code. It sounds paradoxical, but it is generally accepted in the software Q/A business that the number of UNEXPOSED bugs remaining in a module is highly cooordinated to the number you\'ve ALREADY FIXED. (If certain objects and methods keep showing up in problems, they should perhaps be divided into smaller components).

2) However, Strauss may be going to far in declaring it to be a \'system level\' problem (I assume that Strauss has not actually performed a design review from the repository.)

3) EVERYONE is correct (and agrees!) that the nightly build of the last couple weeks have been very unstable until just the last couple of days.

Where the disagreement appears to be is that Strauss (and several other end users) feel that the Nightly Builds should now be approaching alpha/beta quality. While the development team and several other users are staying with the declaration \"they might work and they might not\".

I am not sure what capabilities exist within Mozilla Development and Q/A for running automated regression tests. Again, EVERYONE agrees that the number of features to be tested is far to large for typing and mouse-clicking by humans. But, it doesn\'t seem reasonable that \"end users\" should be suffering destroyed profiles so regularly.

#39 Re: Strauss-bashers... can we chill just a bit?

by turi

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 12:00 AM

"But, it doesn't seem reasonable that "end users" should be suffering destroyed profiles so regularly."

End users use milestones or commercial builds, their profiles don't get "destroyed". http://www.mozilla.org/releases/ clearly says "We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!. We provide no end user support." So it's up to you whether you wan't to break your profile or not. I'm using nightlies since about Milestone 18 and I can live with them very well.

#40 same here

by niner

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 1:35 AM

I don't feel like an end user. If someone is interested in Mozilla I recomend the Milestone builds and not the nightly, because the nightlies are there just for testing. Even if I use Mozilla as my only browser (apart from testing if something works on the others) I'm still considering myself as a tester and I report problems. So like I said before, new checkins are tested very well before the releases, because Mozilla is tested by some (ten?) thousand people additional to the automated smoketests.

I'm using Milestones since M12 and nightlies since M16 and Mozilla has come along very nicely. Maybe there are some problems in the system and maybe development could go faster if they weren't there but I don't think that they will hold Mozilla from "ever release". Overestimating is still not better than underestimating.

#44 Testing process

by SubtleRebel

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 10:15 AM

There _ARE_ automated tests for the daily builds. The build is made and then the tests are run and then problems are found. If at the end of the day the problems have not all been resolved then the nightly build will have problems. If an "end user" runs one of these daily test builds then problems should be expected.

Anyone whining because the nightlies are not stable beta quality builds for end users needs to do a reality check.

Nightly builds are not supposed to be continuously stable beta builds; they are just some of the latest test builds. Milestones are the builds designed to be stable and of beta quality.

#45 Re: Testing process

by macpeep

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 10:58 AM

You are right about automated builds vs. nightly builds quality but even automated "nightly" builds should be as stable and good as possible. When major features don't work in them that USED to work, it's definitely not "normal" or "acceptable". That's why there's the review, super review, approval system - to prevent ANY builds from breaking. I would have to tilt pretty heavily in favor of strauss here.. There are major quality problems here that should not be in software at this stage of the development. Despite what some people seem to think, Mozilla doesn't really have that unique of a development process. This is a relatively normal cross-platform "extreme-programming" process that is quite widely used these days. The size of the project (both in amount of code, amount of people and complexity) isn't unique by any means either.. It's big for sure, but not so that you can assume that no normal rules apply.

#46 Re: Re: Testing process

by joschi

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 11:25 AM

Regressions are just a fact of life at all stages of development in a software project of this size.

#47 Re: Re: Re: Testing process

by macpeep

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 1:21 PM

Yes, regressions are a fact of life. That's why there are various levels of automated tests for it, starting from unit tests and ending with automated smoke tests.. I'm just saying the situation is pretty bad in this particular project..

#48 Re: Re: Re: Re: Testing process

by tny

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 2:46 PM

Is it pretty bad for an open source project?

Open source projects will manifest different symptoms of instability at different points in the development cycle than closed-source projects. Do you think (this is not a rhetorical question) what you and strauss are talking about could be merely another manifestation of this difference?

#49 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Testing process

by strauss

Tuesday December 18th, 2001 9:22 PM

Complex open source projects that have been successful (GCC, Linux kernel, perl, etc.) have started from a small stable initial version worked on by a very small number of people, and then expanded over multiple revision cycles, under the control of a small group of checkin czars. Mozilla doesn't follow this model. There has never been a succesful open source project that started out huge and unstable before its 1.0 release and it's anything but clear that it's a viable development model. At this point, it's running years behind schedule and is still extremely unstable. Generally speaking, rewriting the rules depends on success.

#50 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Testing process

by asa

Wednesday December 19th, 2001 12:13 AM

>At this point, it's running years behind schedule and is still extremely unstable.

Not so unstable that c|net http://www.cnet.com/software/0-3227883-8-7614087-7.html?tag=st.sw.3227883-8-7614087-1.txt.3227883-8-7614087-7 says a mozilla one-off ties the market leader IE and users http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0,10150,0-10000-103-0-1-7,00.html?&qt=netscape61&cn=&ca=10000?tag=dl give it higher overall ratings that IE.

Not so behind schedule that many very good products (Netscape 6.1 and 6.2, ActiveState's Komodo IDE, Galeon Browser, Nautilus, IBM's Warpzilla, the Bloomberg client, etc.) have already been released.

I'm curious what the last build you tested was, how you tested and compared against the competition and what faults you discovered. You're very content pulling conclusions out of other people's data but I don't see you doing any research yourself.

--Asa

#53 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Testing process

by strauss

Wednesday December 19th, 2001 10:59 AM

> You're very content pulling conclusions out of other people's data but I don't see you doing any research yourself.

You're very content trying to take every issue back to personalities and claims of authority, but I don't see you ever responding to the substance of the issues I raise.

#55 Substance

by SubtleRebel

Thursday December 20th, 2001 8:26 AM

>You're very content trying to take every issue back to personalities and claims of authority, but I don't see you ever responding to the substance of the issues I raise.

What substance?

The alledged issues raised in your posts are all only problems in your head: the need for root cause analysis, missed deadlines, defect curve, instable nightly builds, lack of commercial product release, general failure of the Mozilla project, etc.

Various people have tried to explain to you on many occassions that these are not real issues. Yet you still insist that they are. Now we find out that you are basing your opinions of the state of Mozilla on what you have read in forums rather than first hand experience; so of course we then take issue with your authority to judge the state of the project. When you continually try to make yourself sound like some kind of expert while expounding unjustified criticisms, fictional problems, and irrelevant buzz words, then it is only natural that people will call into question your qualifications and integrity.

#51 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Testing process

by SubtleRebel

Wednesday December 19th, 2001 9:04 AM

Where can I find daily builds of these other "successful" open source projects?

Which of these other projects have you been involved in?

For how long of a period did you run daily builds of these projects?

Or did you draw your conclusions about the stability of their daily builds based on the fact that you could not find a public forum discussing the problems with the daily builds?

BTW, at this point, there have been several successful product releases off of the Mozilla codebase and it is stable enough that I have been using it as my primary browser for many months (periodically switching to a newer nightly build). There are not many pre-1.0 products that have had so much success.

#52 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Testing process

by SubtleRebel

Wednesday December 19th, 2001 9:32 AM

I think that is exactly the issue: closed source vs very open source.

Every large scale project has regressions and crashes being generated when new code is checked in, but with most development projects, those builds are not made available to anyone outside the section of the development team directly responsible for the check in. If Mozilla were to adopt such a process then we would see less instability in the daily builds because we would see less daily builds. Some days the nightly build would probably be exactly like the previous day's nightly. I would expect that this would result in much slower progress for Mozilla because it would decrease the benefit of having so many willing volunteer testers.

#54 Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Testing process

by zevious

Wednesday December 19th, 2001 3:28 PM

So, strauss, answer the question:

What was the last version of Mozilla you actually USED?

#56 Test

by kerz

Wednesday October 9th, 2002 3:42 PM

test

#57 Test

by kerz

Wednesday October 9th, 2002 3:44 PM

test