Hi, I wanted to start some discussion on a release plan. Here's my ideas - any comments?
Summary 1.5-beta (late October?) feature freeze 1.5-rc1 (December?) all known bugs fixed - ready for testing by users 1.5: about a month after rc1 champagne time 1.6: Spring 2006 other backwards-compatible enhancements 2.0 loosen compatibility requirements / address syntax and API concerns / incremental addition of new syntax and features *** More Detail 1.5-beta It's unusual for Velocity to release a beta, but I like the idea of freezing all features leaving just a set of obscure bugs. There's 9 enhancement issues in JIRA that need to be addressed for 1.5. Most have patches. All (except for #set null) are straightforward. Given the significance of this release, I think it would be great to put this out in binary form. We can then tell users who need floating point numbers, maps, etc, that they can download a binary instead of checking out the source and compiling. 1.5-rc1 Fix all bugs in JIRA. If we do this right this would end up being 1.5. Probably we'll miss something 1.5 After a fair number of users confirm that 1.5-rc1 has been tested with their applications, then release version 1.5. Maybe a month after RC1? 1.6 Sometime in early-mid 2006, roll out a release with other outstanding backwards compatible improvements. Right now there are 10 issues. 2.0 We keep talking about a mystical 2.0 release that will release us from the constraints of backwards compatibility. I suggest this be narrowly focused on a) cleaning up syntax and API inconsistencies b) adding new orthagonal features/syntax Specifically, I'm talking about whitespace processing, commons-logging, maybe some new tags. We might switch to JDK 1.4 and clean up ORO and other dependencies. Jython or Groovy support would be cool if someone gets fired up about it. Regardless, I suggest we avoid the temptation of doing a big rewrite that never finishes. Think cleanup and incremental changes. And despite the relaxing of compatibility requirements, I'd suggest that most templates still work with a minimum of changes. Thoughts? Thanks, WILL
