Re: How about a fresh release ?

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Saturday 17 September 2005 09:02 am, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:

> Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
> > I was wondering if it wasn't the good moment to do a fresh release of
> > gnuplot, I mean "gnuplot 4.1".

> The most we could usefully do right now is a general review of open=20
> patches and feature requests, with a view towards making a three-way=20
> decision for each and every one of them:
>=20
> 1) outdated ---> tag as such, and close.
> 2) keeper --> tag 'release-critical', integrate in good time, then close
> 3) later --> tag 'later', keep open

That would be valuable in any case. =20
Should we do this by adding comments to the tracker page, or by starting
a thread here on the mailing list, or maintaining a separate status file,
or what?


I seems to me that the major blobs of post-4.0 code have already gone
into cvs.  We could declare a moratorium on major new stuff, and enter
a stabilization/bugfix mode starting now.  Following the model of the
4.0 release, that would mean

 - making a development snapshot available for use in more wide-spread
   testing and bug spotting.  Last time it was the "3.8j" snapshot.

 - triage of the current list of bug reports and feature requests

 - policy decisions on which if any of the current patchsets would be
   acceptable for inclusion in the next release. Anything that doesn't
   make the cut will still remain active as a patchset; it just won't
   go out as part of 4.2

 - some months of fielding bug-reports and platform-specific problems

 - when those seem to have tapered off, a push to the actual release


We followed approximately this sequence last time around:

 Discussion started about June 2003.

 Snapshot 3.8j was put out in Aug 2003; we agreed at that time to
 institute a feature-freeze, with the major pending patchsets held for
 post-V4 inclusion. Amazingly enough, we actually stuck to that.
 The histograms, datastrings, and image mode patchsets were held back
 even though in they were arguably ready to go.

 A lot of debugging followed, with x11 and script interaction needing
 the most attention.  I *hope* nothing is equivalently problematic
 this time around, but we won't know until we try.

 Snapshot 3.8k, labelled "release candidate" was put out in Feb 2004.

 Official release of 4.0 was April 2004, or 7 months after the=20
 feature freeze.

If we agree on a major feature freeze now, put up a snapshot soon-ish,
and things play out as before, that would mean a 4.2 release in the
May/June 2006 timeframe.  Does that sound reasonable to everyone?

> I'd have to be the one to do it, and I don't see where I could
> steal the time for that right now. Last time took about us 6 weeks
> of preparation, the last two of them nearly full-time on my end of things.

Understood. But the front end of the process is primarily a matter
of discussion and agreement of what goes in and what doesn't.=20
That 6-week marathon is way off in the cloudy future of next year :-)

Also, wasn't a good bit of your effort at that time devoted to some
last-minute coding issues like TBOOLEAN and ANSIfication? If we do
this right, we should get any such issues out of the way *before* any
last minute push for release.


=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195