[Scribus] Torture testing Scribus

[DaleCoz at aol.com]

I do want to make clear that nothing I said in my feedback was intended as an 
 attack on Scribus or its developers.  I was impressed with what I was able 
to do with it, and with what my students were able to do with it.  Yeah, the 
students complained a lot, but they also did some pretty impressive things with 
the software.  Students complain.  That's part of being a student. The 
experience wasn't perfect, but it was worthwhile both for the students and for me. 

The glitches were the kinds of things I would expect in a .2 level release in 
the unstable branch of a piece of software.  If there weren't any glitches or 
places where things could be improved this would have been version 1.4 rather 
than 1.3.2.  As I pointed out I've been watching this project for quite a 
while, and I've been impressed with the progress it has made.  I was also 
surprised and gratified at how fast things moved in the transition between 1.3.2 and 
1.3.3. 

I wish I could do more to help, but I'm not really a programming guru, though 
I can crank out reasonably simple stuff in Java and C/C++.  I suppose I 
should have kept better track of the bugs and the crashes I encountered and then 
reported them, but my primary focus was getting the job done. I looked for ways 
around bugs and crashes rather than ways to reproduce them.  Based on what 
little I've done with version 1.3.3 it appears to have eliminated the bug that 
caused about 75% of my actual crashes in 1.3.2.

If the project needs more torture-testing as you approach a stable 1.4 
release I would be happy to devote a few nights to trying to find bugs or things 
that crash the software and reporting them if I can figure out how to 
consistently reproduce them.

I remember that some weird stuff happened as I was trying to figure out how 
to do two booklet-style pages on a landscape sheet of paper.  Parts of some 
lettering but not the picture below it failed to show up on print or print 
preview, though it was visible on the screen.  It happened two or three times when I 
was first trying to learn how to do the booklet pages, then the problem went 
away and I was able to do exactly what I wanted to do.  I don't remember 
enough about how I got to the problem to be able to reproduce it.  I've done enough 
programming to know that something like that isn't particularly useful to a 
programmer.  If I run into the problem again and figure out how to reproduce it 
I'll file a bug report. 

The bottom line in all of this is that while I mentioned a few glitches and I 
didn't win many converts to Scribus among my students I'm happy with Scribus, 
will continue to use and support it, and will almost certainly try to teach a 
unit on it again next fall.
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