On Tue, 2013-09-10 at 07:01 -0700, Josh Andler wrote:
Dates don't seem to motivate anyone all that much. We could have released a while back if people really wanted it.
That's some cynicism Josh. We know that Inkscape's woe is not in the /want/ of people. It's possible developers have a bounty of untapped unpaid time lurking somewhere, but without more upbeat go-getting, positive "WE CAN DO THIS" rallying cries from the leadership... what are you expecting?
You, Bryce, Jazzy, Cruz or bbyak, we only need one to push a release forward from the project leadership. But we need all our leaders/administrators to be upbeat, even in the face of crushing economic reality and bad prior experiences.
All dates will do is piss off the users who read the devel list when we're past the date and not gearing up for release.
We don't have to date the actual release. We can instead date an open-ended freeze process. Pencil in a /want/ for a release, but no date of release.
Although that's harder to enforce with our trunk committing policy, it should be possible to ask feature writers to help fix bugs.
and those bugs didn't get worked on
Don't feel bad about that. That's more likely economics, not a lack of commitment. You talk like someone who's given up already, carrying millstones of previous attempts to do things. Things can still get done, but our leaders must be fearless and quite possibly blissfully ignorant of their past failures. ;-)
Hell, I haven't gotten any help putting in one file into the build system. I don't feel bad. Soon, I'm going to smash into automake like hulk until it works "HULK CHANGE AUTOMAKE MAKEFILE! BUT HULK NO CAN BUILD TARBALL!"
Unless we change our policy, we can't release without bringing them in-tree until 2017.
Change of policy it is then, what's the process?
We can improve developer's prospects on older releases by having branches, solid instructions, and/or scripting to set up the required code in the right places. Waiting for 2017 is silly.
Kind Regards, Martin Owens