On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, MenTaLguY wrote:
Looking at the stuff we have slated for Milestone 6 (0.40), there seem to be several different major efforts going on at once.
I see at least:
- AST
- gtkmmification
- boehm collector
- layers
- text rewrite
I think we need to tease these apart, and perform triage to push some of these into a subsequent milestone.
I think the text rewrite has not received very much attention. Bulia mentioned you were 25% along with layers? Gtkmmification is making progress but it's a huge task; I'd estimate it's only ~10% done.
With gtkmmification, if we pushed that one off, would we possibly be able to back off of the Gtkmm 2.4 libs and go back to Gtkmm 2.2? If so, that could eliminate that dependency worry.
The garbage collector work sounds like it's fairly far along but it sounds like there are issues still to be worked out (dependency trouble if nothing else). A 0.39.5 release would be useful here, in that it would help shake out and expose some of these problems, and let us get it completed.
I don't know where AST is at, but it doesn't sound like it's gotten very widespread review yet; since that is going to be a pretty intensive change, it's probably not something we want to rush. I'd favor giving that the additional development time of putting off to a future milestone.
Bulia says there's a significant amount bug fixing needed. Releases are effective ways of focusing efforts towards getting bugs fixed. Delaying a release only helps if accompanied by a freeze; given how much development is still needed to achieve goals, an extended delay doesn't seem like the ideal approach for the present - we'll be more likely to keep atop the bugs if we focus on releasing sooner rather than later.
It sounds like we need at least a few weeks to get stuff clean enough for a release, so that'd mean a late-October timeframe. That sounds like a good target because it won't conflict with holidays or other end-of-year activities. Then that'd give us a couple months over the holidays to work on stuff, and could shoot for the next release in January.
So I guess the real question is, aside from whether we've met our goals or not, has enough new stuff been implemented to make a release worth the trouble for users to upgrade? Keep in mind that with the new Gtkmm, boehm, etc. libs, this will be a more challenging release for users to install than we've had before. If we are able to back off of the Gtkmm 2.4 lib back to 2.2, that'd lessen that concern quite a bit.
Bryce