On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 09:38:13PM +0100, Maximilian Albert wrote:
BTW, do you have a rough timeframe in mind how long Chill is going to last? How about Frost? Just so that I know how much time I have left for which kind of work (is there any restriction on the kind of work during Frost?).
I'd like to see us move from Chill to Frost in about a week, by say December 20th. During Frost, work should be restricted to bug fixing, with only a few exceptions. I anticipate Frost lasting until mid-January.
Here's how things look for our Chill objectives:
1. Wrapping up development: Good
As expected, there's a few people with last minute features wishing to sneak in under the wire. This is normal, but I'm hoping we can get it settling down soon, since feature work going on late in the development process can risk bugs or incomplete feature work. Probably the only way to force it to really quiet down will be to press ahead to the next phase.
A larger issue is that I don't know entirely what all development work is still under way. It would be really useful at this point to have a list of development projects still under way, so little projects don't pop up at the last minute and force us into making hard choices.
2. Make distcheck issues: Excellent
Sounds like Ted and Aaron have done great work at squashing these. Having this work done in Chill eliminates a big chore that usually plagues us throughout the release process.
3. Triage bug reports: Excellent
I knew switching bug trackers would help make triaging easier, but the work being done is far exceeding what I expected. A phenomenal number of bugs have gotten triaging attention. This work will set us up quite well for doing a bug hunt.
It's also satisfying to see the open bugs curve. While it's not as steep as the triaged bugs curve (20% new bugs handled / week), a solid 5% of our bugs have been closed this past week. It's hard to say what proportion of those were a result of triaging (invalid, out of date, etc.) vs. being actual fixes, but regardless a 5% reduction in open bugs is a huge step in the right direction for us.
Ryan and I created a news item with graphs on inkscape.org.
4. About screen contest: Needs Work
I'm not sure what the status is on this. I think this is the area holding us back the most, and I'm getting worried about it.
5. First draft of Release Notes: Unknown
The release notes look like they're fairly well filled out, but there's still some gaps here and there. Can someone make a list of what we need filled in, and post here for people to look at and comment on?
We have plenty of time to finish filling in the bits later, so as long as we have a todo list, that should be good enough for the Chill.
6. Update tutorials and other docs: Unknown
I don't know where we stand here. Again, it would be nice to have a todo list, especially since this is such a rich area for non-coders to contribute to the release.
Could someone take a look over the state of our existing tutorials and help documentation, and identify:
a) Partly-finished stuff that needs finishing or backing out b) Stuff needing copy-editing c) Critical documentation needs
There's no need (or time) to boil the ocean on this - just the most important work that will add that spit and polish to make users happy.
I've seen a lot of good write-ups posted to this list, or to blogs. A documenter could probably make swift progress by just gathering these bits and snippets together and massaging them into the docs in the appropriate spots.
Note, this would also be a great time for developers to take a break from their development work, to write down some comments on how to use what they developed. These write ups are a huge help for doc writers to draw from.
Bryce