On Sat, 2010-01-02 at 16:12 +0530, Saswata Banerjee & Associates wrote:
On 1/2/2010 1:44 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
On Saturday 02 Jan 2010 12:39:40 pm Saswata Banerjee& Associates wrote:
http://lists.cis-india.org/mailman/listinfo/gnukhata-users
LUG-Bom != GnuKhata Mailing list
Very interesting Siddhesh, Here we have a mailing list that is dedicated to Linux, (GNU/Linux) and Open Source and that has been crying about the need for an accounting software designed to make linux more acceptable to the general users. And when a person on this list is offering to do something to further the same, you ask him to go to the software's own mailing list.
lot of people offer to test software - the very fact that a person is offering and expecting some one to take him up on the offer shows he is not serious. Anyone even vaguely serious would go to the website, look at the software, download and try it out and then come up with ideas/bugs/requests.
You are still in a blinked situation thinking of linux savy software professionals. A CA wanting to test the software for use will only be interested in doing it through double clicking on a .exe file so that it installs on its own. Or if someone sets it up for him. He is not going to develop inhouse linux expertise just to be able to test this software. Agreed, that is why we have the deb packages which can be double clicked.
Any ways such small queries are most welcome from any mailing list because we are not a bunch of volantary hackers working in our spare time. an organisation like NIXI gave funds for paying full-time programmres and now we also have domain expert from accounting background, again payed full-time on this project. Organisation like comet media foundation has just started to use it for their accounting and they provide infrastructure for this project and we wish to give payed support as well.
Secondly, the CA concerned is not going to bother to test the software and then put details of bugs he has found on the mailing list and sit on his hunches waiting for somone some time to respond. He would instead be interested only if he has a direct access to the developer where he can pick up the phone and say "hey buddy, this is what we did and it went like this which is not how the accounts should be." and to be able to explain what happened or should happen and perhaps get them to duplicate it at their end. If you want domain experts to do the software testing, then you cant (at least in this case) wait for a linux savy and linux expert CA to come and do it.
I disagree, to know that some thing went wrong he will first have to try it out and I feel that on a testing ground, mailing list is not a bad thing at all. It is a wrong notion that developers will get back "some time ", at least in this context when they are professionally employed for that. In this situation a mailing list is a very powerful tool. I offered to be contacted personally so that I could share phone numbers etc. Else I would still recommend that the mailing list is used.
happy hacking Krishnakant.