On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 13:51 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Just to give some visibility into some of the work bubbling away these days:
Cairo renderer: Bulia has taken point on investigation of conversion to Cairo. Some tough problems have been uncovered but we're gaining a clearer picture of what needs done. Presently this looks like it will require an all at once brute force approach, rather than incremental refactoring. If so, we'll need to reach a decision on how to undertake that while minimizing disruption to SVN HEAD users.
Yes, I've got a shovel? Where's the plan?
Build system: There is definitely a concensus that our current build system sucks. Options include CMAKE, Bob's buildtool, or just a cleaned up automake. We really need to have interested parties mind meld and find a single solution.
CMake seems good, but I guess its the best one wins and/or who puts in the most time ;)
Version control system: Mental has been experimenting with git and trying to get it to operate with svn. This study is still very early on, but if it works out well, one day we may begin encouraging developers to use git.
Yes, hybrid approach good. But if it ain't broke, why break it ;)
Bug tracking: I have been experimenting with use of Mantis with the goal of replacing our SF bug tracker. It looks good, but the principle issue is how to migrate the bugs and their history from SF to Mantis. I'm also interested in seeing if it can be combined well with Drupal, maybe along with Pootle. Any drupalheads out there?
Lets discuss this somemore. I've been hacking on pootle for Creative Commons so that we can get near live translations of our code projects using pootle's web interface (http://translate.creativecommons.org/)
I abhor drupal, and wonder what the endgame is? Is that for our site? I'm all for just going 100% wordpress since its so easily extensible...yes, I know...we tried the hybrid approach before ;)
Oh, it would be great to have a generalized issue tracker rather than just a "bug tracker," since we want to track more than just bugs, right? We need patch, features, bugs at minimum...
Manual: We've got a good unofficial non-free manual/book and several [semi-]official incomplete free manuals. There is discussion about if efforts can be combined to produce a good official free manual.
Yes, this would be great to standardsize behind something like how scribus does it: http://docs.inkscape.org and/or http://manual.inkscape.org We need an official place for this IMO. This should be easy to do. I think we should just make this a solid portal into the various efforts and let the best rise to the top...
Anyway, I've probably missed something, but I think that covers the pending changes that are percolating. Most of these would benefit from discussion, so we can make sure there is a rough concensus favoring the change - so if you have concerns about any of these changes, now's a good chance to bring 'em up.
Bryce
Thanks Bryce!!!
Jon