On Sun, 6 Jun 2004, Jon Phillips wrote:
Hopefully we can all take a look at the roadmap and sign up for tasks to push it along...About how long will the rest of this milestone take. While I'm not pointing to a time-based release, but what is the reasonable amount of time till we release so I can plan my energy output.
Well, in discussing this with mental and bulia we sense that there is still some work to do on other non-Pango features to get them finalized; for instance, the sluggishness that has been noticed with the fill and stroke dialog, etc. This finalization work would need at least a couple of weeks to settle out and bring to a close.
Second, we do need to make at least one concerted pass through the bug tracker; this is a development release and we can probably afford to release with less intensive bug fixing than previously, but we still should make sure to swat the critical bugs.
Third, for the pango work itself, we would estimate that it's a few person-weeks of effort, but a guestimate of about a week for two developers would probably not be too far off. Fred is committed to working on it, Similarius has offered to help test the Win32 side of things, and so we need one more volunteer with good programming chops to help Fred on it, who can do some work recasting algorithms from NRType style to Pango style, focusing on it intently for a week or two.
These three lines of effort could certainly go on in parallel, if we can get enough people pitching in. If we do, then I think it's definitely realistic that we could get a release out within the month of June, assuming we can pump through the release process itself within half a week or so. Otherwise it could take another few weeks beyond that.
So, I know that a lot of people are working on a lot of different interesting areas, but the trick to getting this release out the door soon is for them to get to a good stopping point and turn attention to bug fixing.
Bryce