Subject: Re: Functional definition of a feature freeze.
From: Dom Lachowicz (dominicl@seas.upenn.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 11 2001 - 09:19:58 CDT
Quoting Martin Sevior <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au>:
> Hi Folks,
> In order to get a 1.0 release out sometime we have to decide to
> make a feature freeze at some point in time. This is a bit tricky for an
> open source project like ours. We have no particular deadline that is
> vital to be met. One deadline I would personally like to meet is to have
> stable 1.0 release for the GNOME 2.0 platform. GNOME 2.0 requires at
> least
> Gtk 2.0. The unix hackers are very keen to port abiword to Gtk 2.0. This
> will be non-trivial in many ways and will require some time.
>
>
> As Tomas has said GTK 2.0 has been "Just about ready" for release for at
> least 1 year. That being the case I propose that as soon as Gtk 2.0 is
> released, abiword should go into feature freeze.
>
> >From then on all new feature to the abiword 1.0 code base should be
> plugins. That way we can either include them or leave them out for the
> actual 1.0 release and more features can be added post 1.0 by means of
> plugins.
>
> This way we can have our cake and eat it too :-)
Hi Martin,
Basing our release deadline on another product is a bad idea, and GTK+2 is an
especially bad 'other product' to base *our* release upon.
I see no other way than to have Abi 1.0 be based upon GTK+1.2.x, and we should
not focus our efforts on porting to GTK+2 *besides* our work to finish abi's
features and close many of the 500 bugs remaining in bugzilla.
I'm suggesting that we work on new features for another 3/2 -> 2 months. There
are just some features that no plugin architecture will get us, such as your
new sections features. Plugins are no panacia, and we don't really have a
full-blown plugin architecture that would enable us to do cool things like
handle mouse motions and clicks. Right now, we're pretty much limited to
importers/exporters and dialogs from plugins, and *nothing* more advanced than
that.
I'm proposing that we change our release numbering to 0.9.99x when we hit our
feature freeze. I'm suggesting that that take place 1 1/2 -> 2 months from
now, regardless of other project's deadlines.
Dom
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