A few more notes I forgot to mention last night, down below...
On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 12:03:44AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Here's an update on where we are in getting the release out.
Windows packaging seems to be shaping up well. Packages for 0.91pre1 are posted to the website. Hopefully we'll see 0.92pre2 packages soon.
OSX still appears in need of volunteers to get packaging sorted. It looks like we may be forced to omit this from our release announcement plans, but let's give it a few more days. If anyone is working on or plans to work on OSX packages, please contact me ASAP.
DPI Scaling bug #1389723 - We still need someone to work on this bug; there have not been new comments.
*** We still need someone to adopt this issue and run it to ground.
Disable unstable features, bug #1589340 - I pushed the MESH option fix. suv's summarized the remaining bits needing done and this looks straightforward to get finished.
Fonts not shown in font manager (Win32), bug #1416674 - This is now dropped as a release blocker. It still needs added to the release notes.
About screen - Work is under way here; hopefully this can get taken care of quickly.
Release Notes - Apart from perhaps adding a few more known issues, we are probably at a point we can consider the Notes complete. This would be a good point to start translating them (or to bring existing translations up to date.)
New snapshot. I've posted source packages for 0.92pre2; there were a few little hitches but nothing major, and nothing that looks like it would impact finalizing 0.92.0.
8. Translations. I'm impressed with the progress, I know it's hard work to get done under the gun, hopefully you've all had adequate time. Please focus on wrapping up work, with a goal of finishing within let's say a week or so. If you get done and have extra time, see task #6!
9. Website Downloads page. Under the Download link, there are platform-specific pages, a Source page, and an Addons page. Those all look great, but there's also another Download page which looks to be mostly redundant, except for the section on Development Versions. I wonder if we could help people avoid confusion and make the pages less subject to get out of date, if we simplified or removed the Download page. Perhaps it could be turned into a "Development Snapshots" type page?
I notice there is quite a bit of variation on how we link to packages, in some cases there are direct download links, in others we point to a gallery, PPA, or other secondary page. The link names themselves also seem to vary quite a bit -- my worry is the user may find our download links a bit unpredictable and thus maybe frustrating. I'm not sure what approach would be best, but it would be very nice to have a standard policy here, with a strong focus on new user usability.
(The reason for the focus on the Downloads page is that we're going to get a massive spike of interest right at the point we release 0.92, so attention invested on this page right now is going to pay off in spades in a few weeks.)
10. Announcement - It's time to start drafting up press releases and organizing some outreach efforts.
Our Announcing Releases wiki page is a good resource and starting point:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Announcing_Releases
Here's the actual page that needs worked on:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/AnnouncePlanning092
We've often had one formal PR, and then an informal one, but we at least must have one or the other written. It would be very helpful to cleanup the list of places to contact and remove ones that are defunct, and/or add new ones that seem more relevant currently.
Anyone who is interested in working on this kind of stuff please drop me a line, or please just go ahead and start editing in the wiki. If you only feel like doing writing, or you only feel like doing the press contacts, that's cool too.
11. Articles - Another excellent outreach is to write something yourself about Inkscape and get it published online somewhere. Some sites will even pay for good articles. These things don't need to be coordinated with the project at all, but timing it to get published during the week of the release will maximize the page hits for you, and the impact for the project.
Right now would be a good time to start writing such stories. If you do want help with review/copyediting/etc. or need help figuring out good places to publish, just ask. We should also plan on a news item on our website to link to media mentions and articles, so please don't be shy about pointing us to your article as soon as it's up.
12. Some odds and ends / janitor tasks.
+ Wiki - A number of pages marked outdated could probably be removed at this point.
+ There is a perl script packaging/mkNEWS that downloads the release notes and reformats them into plain text. I would love to see this script rewritten to Bash or Python and improved to generate better looking output.
+ When uploading packages to the website gallery, there is an option to set a thumbnail/icon image. I usually am in a hurry so don't bother. But it would be nice to have a stock icon, or a simple bash script to generate a custom SVG (and then render to PNG).
+ The Creating_Inkscape_distributions page still has directions to upload tarballs to Launchpad. For 0.92pre2 I went ahead and did this, just to be thorough, but I am wondering whether that's still necessary. If not, we should remove that from the directions.
Some of these probably can't be achieved within the near term, and so are better targeted to 0.93, but please help tackle them now if you've got the time and/or interest.
Thanks, Bryce