OK, I think we need a more formal way to get development of Ant2 going. Some time back we agreed that we wanted to have a requirements document before we start losing ourself in discussions about implementation details or the merits of one proposal over the other. As one result we started collecting random thoughts in docs/ant2 - this is where I want to go further, therefore I put a road map, that should show the way to an agreed upon requirements document, up for a vote.
The road map consists of six stages: (1) As soon as this plan has been accepted, we officially announce that we are collecting feature requests for Ant2 to ant-user as well as ant-dev and make clear that discussion will be on ant-dev only. (2) Everything that pops up (really everything, no matter how far fetched) will be committed to docs/ant/requested-features.txt. I will do my very best to commit everything but any help is appreciated of course. This goes on until a deadline of two weeks after the first announcement has been reached. (3) Everything that has come up will be sorted into one of the following five different groups: i) Things that don't affect the core at all - defer to task writers. ii) Things that aren't concrete but abstract goals: Keep backwards compatibility ... iii) Things that are simple, easy to implement - no further discussion necessary. iv) Things that need to be discussed in detail, but we generally agree upon - workspace concept and similar. v) Things that are controversial in the sense of "do we want this at all?". I'd volunteer in sorting the stuff. (4) Vote on anything in (ii), (iii) and (iv) with a one week deadline on votes. I'd volunteer to tally the votes. The vote on item in bucket (iv) is about whether we want a feature, not about the details. A -1 by any committer should result in putting the corresponding stuff into bucket (v). (5) Parallel to (4) start discussion on (v) with two weeks of discussion and a vote after that. After this vote, we should have an agreement on all abstract requirements. Things from bucket (v) will be either dropped (negative vote outcome) or sorted into the remaining groups. (6) Hash out the details for (iv) in discussions - again with a deadline and voting after that, two weeks should be enough here as well. At the end of step (6) we should have a functional requirements doc that we can build upon. Stefan
