The recent discussion regarding the core refactoring of GnuCash is very encouraging for the future of GnuCash. It will be a lot of work, but at the same time will open up new opportunities for the project as well.
While playing with all those ideas in my mind, I also came across a very practical question: in what timeframe do we see these refactorings accomplished ? Based on the development pace for that lead to 2.4, I feel the refactoring may take well over a year. This is in itself no problem and we don't even have to create a fixed schedule. But at the same time, I would prefer to see more regular major releases in the future. Many distos and large projects are now releasing major versions on a 6 month to 1 year basis. We're not a big project in terms of active contributors of course. But having a shorter release cycle keeps the attention more focussed. And that goes both for developers as the outside world. There is one feature I'm particularly concerned about to release "as fast as possible": the removal of deprecated libraries. Gnome 3 has been released and I think our next major release should really be Gnome 3 compatible. This change will take a lot of work in itself already, but can be accomplished in a shorter timeframe than the full refactoring in my opinion. So here's a rough proposal of a roadmap: 2.6 (early 2012 ?) - replace all deprecated library dependencies - full unit test coverage of all core libraries - perhaps some first refactoring of core libraries - perhaps some small additional features 2.8 - full refactoring of all core libraries - serious effort towards an improved gui based on the refactoring - ... Everything can still change of course, I'm just assessing what is feasible and trying to set some focus. What do you think ? Geert _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
