[Geotools-devel] Release plans

[James M. <j.m...@ge...>]

It has been a long time since a formal release of GeoTools was made, and 
I'd like to see that change.  Ideally there should be a planned regular 
release strategy, so this post is the first step towards working that out.

You can find an initial draft document on this at:
http://geotools.org/design/overview/080timeline.html

As you can see, the plan as it stands, involved branching the CVS 
repository to create a release branch which would then be stabilized as 
much as possible before releasing it, first for testing, and then as 
version 0.8.0

One, perhaps controversial, move that I want to make, is to remove a number 
of packages from the 0.8.0 branch once it has been created.
I propose that:
ogc
gml
mif
sfsql
simplefeature

be removed.  It will be made clear in the 0.8.0 readme that this has 
happened, and that technical users should consider getting a nightly build 
if they want to play with/use features from the above package.

I also propose that the number of included utils and demonstrations will 
have to be cut back, some because they require code found in the above 
packages, others because they are unstable or poorly documented.

There is a lot involved in making a release (which is why they have been so 
few of them) so i could do with all the help I can get to make sure that 
0.8.0 makes a good impression when it is released.

I know some of you will be miffed that some packages/demos won't make it 
into 0.8.0, but the time line I have suggested means that 0.9.0 wont be 
that far behind and we can look at including more code then.

I have been working on a list of tasks that need to be completed before the 
release can take place, you can find the details at:
http://sourceforge.net/pm/task.php?group_id=4091&group_project_id=7222&func=browse&set=open&order=end_date

Though I hope to add more tasks soon, and if possible produce a more 
presentable flow chart and progress page for tracking the release.

Please, please let me know, though this list, any thoughts or suggestions 
you have on this process.

James



-- 
James Macgill
Center for Computational Geography http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk
Spell Checker (c) Creative Spelling inc (aka my dyslexic brain)
http://www.geotools.org a client side java mapping toolkit.