Hey All,
In an effort to honor Bryce's work in this department for previous releases, I've liberally copied & pasted what he wrote last time. :)
I know that it looks incredibly ambitious with the dates on there, but it IS doable provided people have the time and desire. I'd be interested to see what would happen if we plan a bug sprint weekend on May 9 & 10. We can have whoever is up for the challenge commit to it and see what we can pull off in two days.
The following is based on previous release plans. Let me know if there's anything missing.
1. Open development. (Complete)
2. Chill. Development focuses on wrapping up. (In progress) No further refactoring. Identify 'make distcheck' issues Triage bug reports Run an About Screen contest First draft of Release Notes. Update tutorials and other docs
3. Frost. Most development complete. (May 1, 2009) Release Notes should be >90% filled in. Bug Hunt: 500 points Post inkscape-0.47-alpha.tar.gz
4. Feature Freeze. No further development work. (May 15, 2009) Disable features that can't be finished in time. Focus on critical bug fixing. Finalize all tutorials, docs, etc. Finalize all extensions. Translators create translations. Inkscape must pass 'make distcheck' Post inkscape-0.47-beta.tar.gz
5. Hard freeze. Only release wardens can commit to mainline. (May 25, 2009) No further string changes. Focus on release-critical bug fixing. Finalize translations, release notes, etc. Packagers test creating pkgs of the -beta release. Post inkscape-0.47-rc1.tar.gz
6. Branch. Establish the Stable Branch for release (June 5, 2009) Complete any late-late-late work. Final verification of packaging, release notes, docs, etc. Publish more release candidates until ready for release. Plan 0.47.1+ release(s), if needed
7. Release. Post inkscape-0.47.tar.gz (June 15, 2009) Post packages Post official announcements
8. Open development.
I know it is a radically short timeframe, especially given how long 0.46 took. However, our last few releases have been dragged out to a painful degree. Honestly, it seems like most people loathe the process now. So... let's rip the bandaid off and just make it happen. We can modify the schedule at any point of course, but we need to address our biggest issues IMMEDIATELY to attempt to keep the dates as close as possible.
This is doable. We're good, we're smart, we're competent, and we have the resources... we just need to be focused to make this happen.
Cheers, Josh
P.S. As all can see, I'm attacking the bug tracker... I hope other non-coders will contribute to preparing the bug tracker for the bug hunt too (let's free up the bug fixers time to actually fix things, rather than wade through the current mess).