Great! You should do it every day:
"GOOD MORNING LYX" Asger Ottar Alstrup wrote: > John Levon wrote: >> I'm honestly not sure if you're joking. Same goes for Asger. > > I think further clean-up work, reorganisations, refactoring, or other > maneuvers that primarily help the developers at the risk of breaking > things for the users should wait until 1.6.svn opens. The only exception > to this I can think of are things that substantially makes developers > more effective in their work. And renaming a bunch of files does nothing > but waste at least 15 minutes of ALL developers time due to the > recompile involved. > > I believe in release early and often, and the most important thing José > can do now is to make a list of show-stoppers that block a public test > release, and encourage people to work on those issues. > > My take on a show-stopper list right now: > > - Fix cursor trouble > - Fix encoding > - Fix math parser problems with sinx and friends > - Fix toolbar in menu problem > > I've probably missing two or three issues, maybe 5, but look people: The > list is VERY SHORT! > > Therefore I believe LyX will benefit tremendously from a stronger focus > at this point. The program is sooo close to be ready for the first test > release. It is important to take this opportunity now, and not in a few > weeks or months when new problems have been introduced, and the > importance of the limitations has been diluted. > > Right now, there is a pretty clear picture of what the main problems > are, and therefore it's important to act now. The most difficult ones > that were blocking some things have been taken care of, so it should be > possible to do this. There are already patches for most of the above! > > In a few months, 100s of big and small issues will have come and gone, > and everybody will have lost track of what really needs to be done, and > what would be nice to have done. Such a state can go on for eons. > > I believe there IS a feature freeze for LyX right now, although it seems > the list has already partially forgotten this in just 2 days. José IS > the release manager, and he did impose a feature freeze. > > It is even more important to enforce this to some extent. Yes, the > freeze for 1.4 was painful, but that was because it was too long in time. > > The trick to make a freeze a joy is to get it over with quickly by > focusing on what needs to be done. These important issues will NOT go > away by themselves. The important bugs HAVE to be taken care of at some > point or another. > > In such a situation, it will almost NEVER help to work on another > feature. Every new feature just increases the back log of things that > needs to be done. > > I really encourage all to work towards reducing the list of > show-stoppers, because it is within reach right now. > > Yes, there are problems with the cursor, and those might be difficult to > fix. Take a crack at this now, and if you fail, revert Andrés rendering > change while it's still managable. That will fix the problem, possible > at the expense of a minor performance gain. Do not postpone this > problem, because it only becomes bigger and bigger with time. > > Take an action on the encoding issue now, because the problem only > becomes bigger and bigger with time. > > If each and every one of you has this mindset, you will reach the goal > very quickly, because 1.5.svn is closer to be a releasable in a test > version than it ever was. > > I would aim for a test release in a week. > > Regards, > Asger > > -- Peter Kümmel
