On 2010-09-24 12:45-0400 Hazen Babcock wrote: > Alan W. Irwin wrote: >> [...]Is the 5.9.7 development release still on for next >> weekend? > > Yep, assuming that there are no objections.
Hi Hazen: For those who might be doing some last-minute documentation (probably not me since I hope to finish the pllegend docbook documentation today) what day this weekend and what approximate time of day do you plan to start the release process? I was about to give you a shopping list of on-going development that would justify making the next release cycle our normal longer development cycle. For example, we need to work on plcolorbar to complement pllegend. Also, the misaligned legend results for example 26 show a lot of work needs to be done so that plstrl gives the correct string-size results for unicode-aware device drivers. However, when I checked records, it turns out our last stable release (5.8.0) was almost three years ago! Thus, we have been putting off the release of 5.10.0 for much too long a time (probably mostly due to my requests for more development release cycles). But, of course, on-going development can always be used to put off stable releases so if we don't do a stable release soon, we may never do so. Furthermore, I think we could benefit from a short stable release cycle where we concentrated exclusively on testing, bug fixing, API propagation, and documentation and where the developers made a commitment not to commit any new core development work to svn trunk during that short cycle. The first obvious question, Hazen, concerning this possibility is whether or not you can commit to a short release cycle (say with a release of 5.10.0 two or three weeks from the release of 5.9.7 this weekend)? Assuming that short time scale is possible for the next release, what do the other developers here think about this possibility? Would you be against it (because you have a lot you want to develop and waiting through a stable release cycle disrupts your plans); go along with it without participating because of other time-commitments during the next few weeks (obviously no shame is attached to that because of the extremely short notice); or would you be for it implying you could contribute some testing, bug fixing, etc., help during that time? I would be for it since I could use a week or two to properly test PLplot using MinGW under wine, and I hope others would be willing to participate as well (say by propagating pllegend to various languages and updating examples 4 and 26 in those languages earlier in the release cycle and/or running scripts/comprehensive_test.sh for their platform and reporting the results on our Wiki later in the release cycle). Note the above proposed moratorium on _core_ development (i.e., changes to libplplotd) during this short release cycle does not apply to language changes. For example, I am aware from off-list discussions with Jerry that he has some Ada changes planned, and I think those would be fine so long as he completed them early in the release cycle so that those changes got full testing later in the cycle. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
