Ted Gould wrote:
On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 18:55 -0700, Josh Andler wrote:
First, an official Happy New Year to you all! I'm breaking down this email into a few sections below.
Happy New Year to you too!
Releases: A newer release of Inkscape will be going into the next distro release cycle. Whether this is 0.46.1 or 0.47 is what needs to be determined.
I'd really like to see us move towards a 0.47. Even if that means missing the various distro deadlines, I think that's a better goal. I'm not sure that it has to derail any 0.46.1 work, I just don't think there are a lot of users that would upgrade to a new point release.
Agreed.
Build Systems: Discussion of the possibility of switching build systems to cmake or btool has resurfaced again recently. It seems like the obvious goals should be that we use one build system on all platforms and it be something that is maintainable by multiple individuals.
I'm still not that interested in switching. I believe that there have been contributions to make autotools work for win32 builds... It seems to me at least from the CVS mailing list that the CMake effort has stalled (Johan mentioned some issues). So, I think this can be tabled.
Autotools is a well tested and popular system there can be no argument about that. I've tried a few times to dive in and fix bugs or add features to the autotools build system unsuccessfully. And even after asking I was not able to find a single individual willing to offer advice. Autotools is an impediment for novice developers. I will stop complaining if some of the more experienced devs will step forward to document how we use autotools and offer to train others.
Future Releases: After this extremely long development cycle, and the amount of future refactoring we're still looking to do, I think we need a new stable/devel branching strategy for the future. Or at the very least, a bleeding edge branch for GSoCers and the like in addition to main devel. Also, it would be great to have regular releases that tie into the distro release cycles (with minimal benefit of easy PR). Anyone else care to chime in?
I think that's an interesting idea. I think that a DVCS would help here. The problem with having multiple branches is that they get different levels of testing. So by having a single trunk we end up with limited testing of people on several branches. But, I think if people can use branches effectively, they will. We should be able to branch off a release earlier though. I don't know. That wasn't coherent.
Testing is one issue. My biggest worry is the amount of work it takes to maintain two branches. We've attempted this a few times with bug fix releases now. And I think the experience shows that it will be difficult to find people who can do the branch maintenance work and keep it up for any amount of time without burnout.
Aaron Spike