Hi all, I volunteered to act as release manager for the next Evergreen version (proposed 2.7) and received general confirmation for the role by participants at the developer meeting held on March 21, 2014 at the Evergreen conference. There will be a formal vote in IRC at the next online developer meeting.
As discussed during that meeting, the following is a short list of general objectives/ideas intended for our next development cycle: 1) Highlight new features under development for feedback during dedicated time at our monthly developer meetings. This is intended to give more direct feedback for new development which may impact large areas of Evergreen and bring it to the attention of the whole group. It continues to be a strong recommendation for any developer to announce new development work early via Launchpad, lists, etc. for greater community review and feedback. 2) Engage community participation for official "bug wrangling / fixing days" where we focus on identifying and fixing bugs affecting many members as noted in Evergreen's Launchpad bug tracker. These would likely precede official deadlines for releases to give time to incorporate any work in the various milestones. Dates to be determined. 3) Review our internationalization/translation processes and work to involve and support new groups interested in translating the different parts of Evergreen. The development team is still looking for an interested person to take on a role of Translation Manager, but in the meantime, extra attention will be given during this release cycle to groups or individuals interested to participate in Evergreen translation efforts. 4) Deprecate and remove old code that is no longer necessary or broken. As one immediate example: the old style circulation scripts have been officially deprecated since version 2.4 in favor of in-database circulation policies and we should remove the circ scripts completely from the code base along with any other unnecessary pieces. 5) Along the way, there will be announcements made with regards to the web-based staff client development. In particular, it was decided among developers that specific modules within the staff client will be announced as feature frozen while work for the web-based rewrite is done for those modules to achieve feature parity with existing capabilities. This will mean that throughout the development cycle, there will be times when all developers will be asked to refrain from adding new features to the existing staff client for specified modules. There will be some discussion between the developers to decide all these dates in advance and they will be announced soon. As for general timeline, I believe that Dan Wells has laid out a great framework for us to follow during his time as release manager. Some potential dates to get started thinking about (I decided I like Thursdays, so I've selected the major Thursdays with some minor adjustment for major US/Canadian holidays): June 5 -- target main features for initial 2.7 milestone review July 10 -- 2.7 alpha August 7 -- 2.7 beta September 4 - 2.7 RC September 18 - 2.7.0 Final There will be more dates to be included and I plan to update the Evergreen calendar to reflect these events, along with the dedicated bug days and module freezes for web-client development. I look forward to working with everyone -- developers, reviewers, and users alike. My desire is to provide good feedback on Evergreen's ongoing development efforts to our whole community as we move into this next phase of work. Please feel free to respond to this email with any questions or concerns regarding the plan as I have outlined. This is just our first draft plans and there is still room for discussion and review. -- Ben -- Benjamin Shum Evergreen Systems Manager Bibliomation, Inc. 24 Wooster Ave. Waterbury, CT 06708 203-577-4070, ext. 113
