John Levon wrote:
I'm honestly not sure if you're joking. Same goes for Asger.
I think further clean-up work, reorganisations, refactoring, or other
maneuvers that primarily help the developers at the risk of breaking
things for the users should wait until 1.6.svn opens. The only exception
to this I can think of are things that substantially makes developers
more effective in their work. And renaming a bunch of files does nothing
but waste at least 15 minutes of ALL developers time due to the
recompile involved.
I believe in release early and often, and the most important thing José
can do now is to make a list of show-stoppers that block a public test
release, and encourage people to work on those issues.
My take on a show-stopper list right now:
- Fix cursor trouble
- Fix encoding
- Fix math parser problems with sinx and friends
- Fix toolbar in menu problem
I've probably missing two or three issues, maybe 5, but look people: The
list is VERY SHORT!
Therefore I believe LyX will benefit tremendously from a stronger focus
at this point. The program is sooo close to be ready for the first test
release. It is important to take this opportunity now, and not in a few
weeks or months when new problems have been introduced, and the
importance of the limitations has been diluted.
Right now, there is a pretty clear picture of what the main problems
are, and therefore it's important to act now. The most difficult ones
that were blocking some things have been taken care of, so it should be
possible to do this. There are already patches for most of the above!
In a few months, 100s of big and small issues will have come and gone,
and everybody will have lost track of what really needs to be done, and
what would be nice to have done. Such a state can go on for eons.
I believe there IS a feature freeze for LyX right now, although it seems
the list has already partially forgotten this in just 2 days. José IS
the release manager, and he did impose a feature freeze.
It is even more important to enforce this to some extent. Yes, the
freeze for 1.4 was painful, but that was because it was too long in time.
The trick to make a freeze a joy is to get it over with quickly by
focusing on what needs to be done. These important issues will NOT go
away by themselves. The important bugs HAVE to be taken care of at some
point or another.
In such a situation, it will almost NEVER help to work on another
feature. Every new feature just increases the back log of things that
needs to be done.
I really encourage all to work towards reducing the list of
show-stoppers, because it is within reach right now.
Yes, there are problems with the cursor, and those might be difficult to
fix. Take a crack at this now, and if you fail, revert Andrés rendering
change while it's still managable. That will fix the problem, possible
at the expense of a minor performance gain. Do not postpone this
problem, because it only becomes bigger and bigger with time.
Take an action on the encoding issue now, because the problem only
becomes bigger and bigger with time.
If each and every one of you has this mindset, you will reach the goal
very quickly, because 1.5.svn is closer to be a releasable in a test
version than it ever was.
I would aim for a test release in a week.
Regards,
Asger
