To Arjen, Phil, and Jim: I am addressing this post mostly to you guys because you are the only ones I am aware of that are still working on substantial (i.e., non bug-fix) changes for this release cycle.
As release manager, I really appreciate how hard all of you are working on improving PLplot in the areas of the Fortran binding, wxwidgets device driver, and plmeta/plbuf. And hopefully most or all of your substantial changes will get into the forthcoming release (scheduled for February 28th). I ask all of you to do all your development on topic branches and always use care about what you push to the master branch (Arjen or Phil) or request others to push to the master branch (Jim). Following these rules throughout the release cycle is important, but it becomes especially critical near the end of release cycle (our current status). The criteria you should consider about substantial (i.e, non bug-fix) master branch changes at any time but especially this close to release are the following: 1. Is your change thoroughly tested on Windows and Unix (typically Linux) with no build issues and no segfaults at run time? I think it is fair to say from the topic-branch commits I have seen via git format-patch (or other means), that the current state of the fortran binding and wxwidgets rewrites qualify on the build question but are disqualified by the run-time part of this criterion, but hopefully that will change soon in both cases. 2. Is it better than what it is replacing? I think it is fair to say from the topic-branch commits I have seen the current Fortran binding and wxwidgets rewrites are partially disqualified by this criterion, but hopefully that will change soon in both cases. Users of the Fortran binding rewrite should have an easier time of it (less worries about typing of variables) then the current Fortran binding. However, as I have told Arjen elsewhere, one of the big motivations for this rewrite is to make the Fortran bindings implementation much simpler. That goal has not been realized yet, and I hope to see that change soon. My impression is Phil has already achieved one of his desired goals which is a greatly simplified and easier to maintain wxwidgets device driver. Of course, the current rendering issues are of concern, but from what Phil has said, he is actively working on those so the prospects of meeting this criterion soon look fairly good. I don't know the status of the plmeta/plbuf changes with regard to these two criteria, but I strongly encourage Jim to make his topic branch commits available to the plplot-devel list via git format-patch so they can be evaluated by these criteria by everybody. <aside> And similarly for Arjen (who has been communicating with me by tarball because he has been having difficulty using git format-patch on Windows). Can someone here give Arjen advice about a good command-line git client to use on Windows where the format-patch command "just works"? </aside> Note your deadline for passing the above two criteria is going to be February 21st or ~3.5 weeks from now. The reason for that deadline is that testers need roughly a week of the master branch having no substantial changes to do their tests because any substantial change on master during that week will mean the tests (some of which take a couple of days) will have to be redone. If you cannot meet that deadline, then I suggest you give your highest priority to finishing the small changes (such as Jim's plmem.c changes) that can be committed to master before that deadline. That tactic will at least get rid of all minor distractions from working toward your major goal of a rewritten Fortran binding, wxwidgets device driver, or plbuf/plmeta functionality. And for the case that you do miss that deadline, I strongly encourage you to just keep working steadily on your topic branch so that ideally on release date + 1 day you satisfy the above two criteria and therefore will be in a position to push your changes to master. Such substantial master changes early in the next release cycle would justify a very short next release cycle which in turn implies there won't be a huge penalty if you miss the February 21st deadline but keep working steadily on a topic branch instead. 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); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming. 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