On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, bulia byak wrote:

...

How do people feel about timeframes for doing a release?

I haven't yet finished all the featurework I planned for 0.39. Maybe in a week. Others I know are also in the middle of something (Karl, Sim, Mental) which would be nice to have finished. Mental's work on statusbar absolutely must be finished. So I suggest that people report to the list when they're done with features and can go into the freeze and bugfixing stage. I cannot yet.

Okay cool, this is good info. I spoke with Ted and it sounds like he's finished what he had planned to code for this release. Kees is working on adding the metadata stuff to the Document Properties dialog, but last I talked to him, he was unsure that all the underlying work could be done in a short enough amount of time. I have helped a bit with the statusbar work; I completed as much as I knew to do and need input for what to do next.

I also have on my todo list to help with writing an extensions proposal, which is a task for this release. If we have a couple weeks prior to release I think this can still be done.

Also I'll need time to document the major new things in tutorials. This also needs time. And I want to do more redrawing cursors and icons, which is cosmetics but also important.

If there are people interested in / able to help with this work, would it be something you could farm out to them?

Also we need to make testing easier for people this time. I'd suggest making nightly autobuilds for Linux too (or maybe autopackages), not only for Windows, during the ауфегку freeze so that we can get feedback from those who don't feel like compiling. And we need to announce our unofficial betas earlier and wider, to prevent things like the .1 release we had to do last time.

We do have nightly autopackages posted at http://autopackage.org. If people could use that it would kill two birds - first since then we don't have to set up another nightly autobuild process yet, second so we can get some additional testing of autopackage itself. I'll take the task of encouraging people to use this approach.

If I recall correctly, the issues that caused the need for the .1 release were due to insufficient change control; non-trivial code changes were being checked in at the last minute, and one or two of these changes introduced serious bugs. So I agree we should announce our unofficial betas earlier and wider, but I think to prevent the causes of the .1 release last time what we really need is a firmer code freeze especially in the last couple days prior to release. What do you think?

Bryce