User manual

XCSoar User Manual
The full terms of the licensing agreement for XCSoar is given in
Appendix A.
The development of XCSoar since its open source release has been
entirely a volunteer effort. This does not preclude individual de-
velopers or organisations from offering commercial support ser-
vices. The spirit of the project however suggests that in such cases
the commercial services are encouraged to produce some flow-on
benefit back to the wider community of users.
13.4 Development process
We try to incorporate new features as quickly as possible. This
has to be balanced by the needs to not change substantially the in-
terface without appropriate warnings so users that upgrade do not
get a shock. This means that when we introduced the new button
menu system in version 4.5, it was necessary to also distribute a
file that allowed users to have the buttons assigned to their ‘legacy’
function.
XCSoar, being used in flight, is a special kind of software because
it can be regarded as ‘mission-critical’, and is a real-time system.
This has placed a very high emphasis on developers to perform a
great deal of testing before releasing changes to the public.
Flight testing is certainly the best sort of test, but we have also
been able to conduct the bulk of testing by using XCSoar in a car,
and more recently, by replaying IGC flight logs.
In general, we don’t want the program to crash or hang, ever, and
if it does so during testing, then whatever bug caused the problem
has to be fixed as top priority.
The software developers all keep in contact with each other through
the SourceForge developer’s mailing list
[e-mail]
We try to coordinate our activities to avoid conflict and duplicated
effort, and to work together as a team. If you would like to get in-
volved in the software development, send the developers an email.
13.5 User base
Who is using XCSoar? Good question, and hard to answer. Since
no-one pays for the product — most people download the program
anonymously — it is hard for anyone to keep track of how many
users are out there.
162