Hi all,
As the release of 0.42 nears, I haven't been able to help thinking about what we should do for the next release. I'd like to throw some thoughts out for comment.
I think we're all ready for a bit faster release cycle. 0.43 really took a bit too long. Partly that's because we wanted a nice long development cycle, but mostly because we had some extremely ambitious goals.
This release, though, the goals are more modest (and already mostly done). As well, we have four Google Summer of Code students producing code, and I think it would serve their learning process (and our own ability to review the code and give them feedback) if they can start getting their code drops out to the Inkscape audience.
Thus, I'd like to propose that for at least 0.43 and 0.44 that we shoot for something on the order of a month each:
3 weeks development 2 weeks feature freeze - stabilization / bugfix ~1 week hard freeze release repeat
As far as specific development goals, I think we should just set the one goal of having some working code from each of the SoC students, (plus whatever else gets done by others). Some of the students may need our assistance in learning how to integrate code, test it, fix bugs, and so forth.
(The originally planned goal of the 0.43 release was to work out how to do extensions, which thanks to hard work by Ted, ACSpike, and others, is already fairly well in the bag.)
Anyway, let me know your thoughts on the above, and if it sounds acceptable, we can start on this plan of action as soon as the release of 0.42 is complete! :-)
Bryce