Chris, thank you doing this. I think it's important to have a good instrument to determine our progress towards an initial release. I was a bit shocked when I summed up only the points you've marked as high priority: 20 weeks. It got me thinking and running all the example files again that I haven't run since early this year. Some still don't work, some don't work anymore. Some look surprisingly good.
To your task list: Do you propose that all listed tasks should be completed prior to an initial release? I think that there is a number of tasks that are not really necessary for an 0.3, ex. floats, writing mode/BIDI, last page. It would be great if we could break down the things that need to be done into milestones. That may make it easier to communicate to the outside world what our progress is. And we would also know where we stand, because that's one of the biggest problem we currently have. Those who currently work on layout, how do you choose your work area? One big problem I currently see is testing properly. We don't have a good set of tests that we can simply run. The example document are all a big mess demonstrating several features at once. Sometimes I don't even understand how it should (!) look. Personally, I'd add one important, high priority task to the list: (Finally) creating a good test/QS environment along with several simple documents each training a single feature. Attached to this task should/could be the Java2D renderer which we can used to easily create comparable bitmaps. I don't believe in MD5 checking of PDF at this stage. That may be good as soon as we're in the maintenance phase again. Every now and then we get asked when there will be a next release. We need to have some kind of answer for them. A good answer may even make some company boss invest into FOP because he sees the end of the tunnel. I think we will never get there if we target the full feature set for the initial release. We can't but break down the whole thing into manageable parts. Food for flames....as usual. On 22.09.2004 16:35:51 Chris Bowditch wrote: > Team, > > I have been trying to work out what is left to do be done before we can do an > initial release of HEAD, 0.3, say. I know some of you will prefer to aim for a > 1.0 and get everything right first time, but please bear with me. > > I have consolidated the layout issues from [1] and [2] The infrastructure > items listed in [1] I feel are good enough for a 0.3 release. This is largely > thanks to work from Glen, Finn, Simon, Luca, Peter, Jeremias and the other > committers. Sorry if Ive missed anyone. > > Anyway, i have created a wiki containing the work items along with my opinion > of priority and a finger in the air time estimates: > > http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?FOPWorkEstimates > > I would very much appreciate some feedback. > > Chris > > [1] http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?FOPProjectTasks > > [2] http://xml.apache.org/fop/design/layout.html#status-todo Jeremias Maerki
