Users


One of our translators and contributors mentioned to me that they had comments to the effect that Scribus is a “closed shop”. In other words, the team is really not open to adding new developers and contributors. So let’s dispel that rumour right now.

It is not true. Not now, not before, never.

To an outsider, it might appear that way, but not by intent. The Scribus Team is probably a bit different than most in that we are a bit older, perhaps than the average OSS team. Several of us have a few grey hairs on top – but that is a Good Thing for many reasons. :-)

Our experience in various parts of graphics and pre-press has given us a sense of direction about what not only Scribus needs, but what to avoid like faux bold and italic . Sometimes avoiding the same architectural and “feature” errors we’ve suffered as users in the past is just as important as ultra coding foo.

One other thing which is important to understand that we do work very harmoniously as a team. We share the same core values of respecting our users and each other’s unique talents and capabilities. We choose, compliments before criticism, cooperation instead of flaming and division. This, I think, is transmitted through in the way the community surrounding Scribus has grown. Note the lack of flame wars on our mail list. That is something I think we can be proud of and if we are protective of that – so be it.

However, get closer and you will see that Scribus is far from a “closed shop”. Surrounding the core team is a larger circle of folks whose contributions are not only valuable, but necessary. One look at Help > About, the mailing list or a look at the Wiki is evidence enough for me.

To the contrary, we do want more coders, more translators, more packagers and folks to help with testing bugs. Jump in! The water is just fine.

Two days ago I filed issue #4000 on Scribus’s bug tracker. :-)
I also wanted to file #3000 but mrdocs beat me on that this January.
Ugh? Another 1000 bugs in merely six months??

Yep. This shows that the Scribus project is not only active at the development front but also has people who care about its quality and keep track of issues. Fortunately, most of these 1000 new bugs are already closed:

scribus-bugs-cummulative
Another diagram shows that the majority of issues are feature requests or minor issues:


Currently there are only 116 unresolved issues with severity major, block or crash. So what happens to issues which get resolved? While we also have resolutions like “no change required” and “won’t fix”, most issues get fixed:

Which shows we are not only working hard, but we’ve also got the statistics to prove it! ;-) For those who are interested in more statistics, they should check out the “Summary” and “Advanced summary” sections at http://bugs.scribus.net.
Keep on feeding us those bugs, we love it!

/Andreas