I had a discussion about this a little while back. Is the distance between the user and the people who develop the application growing? How are distributions part of this gap?
Personally I often notice this distance.
I receive very very little bug reports.
You can say this is a good thing, but I doubt it. I know there are bugs, lot of them. Getting bug reports is needed. Needed to fix bugs in parts of GMPC I hardly ever use, also to keep the developer (me) motivated.
Part of the problem is; bugs are reported! but in the wrong places.
For example check this page on launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gmpc.
These are not all ‘package’ bugs, they are bugs in GMPC, that need to be reported UPSTREAM!. I haven’t seen them.
But the same goes for other distributions, forum etc. I once found, by accident, a patch fixing a crasher on debians system. I refuse to go hunting distributions forums and bugtrackers.
Feedback from users.
I hardly get feedback from users. What don’t they like, what would they want to add, etc.
This again is somewhat crucial to improve things.
Reviews.
Reviews like this one here are very nice. But again, nobody ever informed me about it. Googling on gmpc made me find it one day.
Number of users.
This is more a personal one, I am a bit of a control freak and I would love to know how many users there are.
I wonder what other projects notice? if not, what do they do different? I know GMPC is a niche product, but still.
3 Comments
Hello!
Your software is really nice, thank you for your work.
About bug reports: mpd bugtracker is not a very comfortable place to post bugs relative to launchpad, and launch pad is much easier to find. Also, lp allows to set an external bugtracker for a software.
About feedback: For me gmpc has almost all functionality needed for such a program. Maybe it will be great to see some plugins to integrate gmpc with ubuntu specific notifications and sound indicator.
About number of users: it’s very hard to get such numbers for opensource piece of software, but you can get distro specific information. E.g. http://popcon.ubuntu.com/ – for ubuntu
For the gmpc project on launchpad the external bugtracker should be set, but not for the packages.
I agree mantis is not perfect. But it is not that hard to find, it is on the website, wiki, launchpad page, etc.
Hi Qball,
i like GMPC very much and it’s one of the most used software by me.
feature wishes and report also bugs to mantis.
I always hope to have not too much (maybe special
It’s difficult to give a answer about the number of users. The mpd users seems to increase the last years. There are also many new clients for example for Android mobiles or a running mpd at popcorn a tv media player. So also GMPC user should be increase.
Thanks for your work!