On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 02:30:10PM -0500, Alan Jones wrote:

It has been a while since the last formal version of Inkscape.

Any chance of a new one coming out anytime soon?

I have been watching the mailing lists, but not see much about a new version.

Yes, there's been some talk about this on IRC and Jabber recently. Last month we had a thread where we thought April might be a good time to get started on a release.

Probably a good first step is to get a status on work currently in progress, so we can give folks the time needed to wrap things up, before we get into freezes and such.

Another thing I'm wondering about is how much bug fixing work will be needed. For 0.43 I think we actually spent _too_ much time in bug fix mode, to the point that it almost burnt out a few people (which may be the cause for the long period between releases). Yet at the same time, much development has gone on, and we may have a lot of defects to eliminate. We'll have to find a fair balance there...

Bryce

On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 03:06:40PM -0600, John Taber wrote:

Beyond 0.44, is there any interest to release on the Gnome schedule - the next one being Oct which could include the SOC projects. Advantage of such a schedule would be getting the latest version into Fedora and Ubuntu releases since they kind of revolve around Gnome schedule. Just a thought.

Hmm, when we discussed this before there wasn't a strong interest, but if enough developers supported that, I think it'd be doable.

IIRC, the main feeling was that having a hard release deadline risked forcing us to release something before the developers really felt it was ready. Also, we tended to have a lot more frequent releases than GNOME, so if the distros just took whatever release was most recently done, I think we figured that'd be "close enough".

Bryce

On 4/15/06, Jon A. Cruz <jon@...18...> wrote:

On Apr 15, 2006, at 2:06 PM, John Taber wrote:

Beyond 0.44, is there any interest to release on the Gnome schedule - the next one being Oct which could include the SOC projects. Advantage of such a schedule would be getting the latest version into Fedora and Ubuntu releases since they kind of revolve around Gnome schedule. Just a thought.

Well... we might wind up 0.44 soon.... (soon-ish), but then have 0.45 that just happens to wind up matching that other timeframe. Or 0.46... who knows.

:-)

Just a suggestion.

If releases are burning developers out, perhaps you could adopt the Linux Kernel model and call every other release a beta candidate.

Tidy up 0.44, call it a beta candidate, release it to users with a warning that this is a buggy version but it has new cool features. Leave 0.43 up as the official release for most users. When 0.44 is as bug free as you can get it, call it 0.45 and make it the new 'official' release, whenever that happens. In the mean time, all 'new' features go into 0.46, which will be the next beta candidate.

InkScape is a pretty complicated bit of work and I can understand how stressful it must be to get a release out. Maybe it's time to look at something like this to ease the pressure?

-- Cheers! Rick