[Plplot-devel] Road to our next stable release

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

Hazen's comments and questions about the changes to the release procedure
due to our switch to subversion have got me thinking about how we get from
here to our next stable release, 5.8.0.

My own feeling is we should do at least one more development release, 5.7.4,
in a month or two.  That gives us a chance to work out any bugs in the
release process itself caused by the switch to subversion.  It also gives us
a chance to finish up a number of different development/documentation
projects. These projects include the Ada interface API changes (Jerry
Bauck), the Ada examples (a number of us are waiting to help with those once
the Ada API is finalized), fortran 95 documentation (Arjen Markus), a family
of Cairo-based device drivers (Hazen Babcock), and a new windows device
driver (Jim Dishaw).  Please let me know if there are any other on-going
projects out there that have a chance to be finished before the 5.7.4
release.

I think you should consider the 5.7.4 release deadline an important one for
development since 5.7.4 is likely to be our last development release before
we make our 5.8.0 stable release.  Furthermore, I propose we release 5.8.0
relatively soon after 5.7.4.  The interval should be long enough to give
5.7.4 users a chance to report bugs, but should be short enough that we do
not start adding a lot of new features beyond what is already in 5.7.4.  I
think an interval of about a month between 5.7.4 and 5.8.0 would be about
right.

Hazen, what do you think of this proposed schedule for the release of 5.7.4
and 5.8.0? Please modify it to conform with your own personal time
constraints since a lot of that proposed rough schedule depends on you both
as our release manager and also as developer.

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); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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