[matplotlib-devel] Release planning/milestones

[Thomas C. <tca...@gm...>]

Hey all,

To start with, the 2.0 release is pending a choice of new default color
map.  I think that when we pick that we should cut 2.0 off of the last
release and then the next minor release turns into 2.1.  If we want to do
other breaking changes we will just do a 3.0 when that happens.  It makes
sense to me to bundle default color changes as one set of breaking changes
and code API changes as another.

Eric made the case in an issue that we should not continue the 1.4.x series
and start working 1.5.0, which fits well with aiming for a 6month scheduled
release cycle (minor release in July, bug-fix release in February).

To this end, I have clean out and close the 1.4.x milestone (most of issues
just got moved 1.5.0) and created a 1.5.0 milestone.  I set a target for
1.5.0 to be released at scipy as that seems like a reasonable thing to.
Targeting just after SciPy also makes sense so we have a clear list of
things to work on at the sprints.  Thoughts?

My internal list of what we should try to get in for 1.5.0 are:

 - visitor pattern on all artists + recreating figure from it's visited
artists.  This gets us a) proper serialization of our figures instead of
going through pickles and b) makes interoperability with plotly/b3/bokeh
easier

 - pyplot overhaul (use decorators, provide decorators as part of public
API)

 - navigation by events (PR #3652 + MEP22)

 - making OO interface easier to use interactively (if interactive,
auto-redraw at sensible time)

 - pull the pyplot state machine out of backend_bases and expose the
figure_manager classes

 - overhaul the website

Anything else people think should be on the list or any protests to this
list?

Tom