All, I've been thinking about the future of Lucene.NET lately, and where I want it to be by the end of the year. So far, we've had a decent year, with two releases, both the 2.9.4 and 2.9.4g branch, and I want to keep this release streak going. So, how are we doing on version 3.0.3?
Surprisingly well. The changes to core were actually finished before the new year, in last December. What has been done the past three months has been work on various Contrib libraries and making the API act a little bit more like a .NET library should. I think that the Contrib libraries are in good shape, thanks to everyone that's had a hand in bug fixes and porting the new versions. There is one Contrib library that I feel we absolutely cannot release without, and that is Highlighter. It is a popular library in the Java version, and I imagine that also goes for .NET, though there isn't much talk about it on the one issue we have regarding porting it. I'm going to work on finishing porting it today, however, it is blocked by LUCENENET-481, which will also need to be taken care of. The only other major thing that needs to be finalized, are the sub-tasks for LUCENENET-467, particularly the one related to changing Get and Set methods to .NET Properties. There has been a lot of work done on this already, and I think it's just about completed, save for a few things that need to be verified. Some properties *may* need to be converted back to properties. I was a little gung-ho with some of the property changes, thanks to Resharper, and there are sometimes overloads of a property that don't act at all like data. This will have to be fixed somehow, either by changing the property back to separate methods or changing the API a little bit to afford certain classes the ability to have a property, where others shouldn't. All of this being said, I feel we are *very* close to a release of Lucene.NET 3.0.3. My goal, and I hope others will agree with me, is that we will have release 3.0.3 NO LATER THAN the end of this month, April 30th. I think this is a very reasonable goal, in fact, I think it's possible we could even release it far before this. However, the process can sometimes be slow, so I feel giving us a maximum of a month to complete it should suffice. I am in the rare position of having the rest of the week pretty much 100% available to work on the project, so I will be able to get a lot done from now until the weekend. Since I can probably spend more time than others who are more busy, I'm expecting to get through a lot of different projects. Anyone who is working on a part of Lucene, whether it's a particular issue, a Contrib project or anything else, let me know if you can commit to having it done within a week or two or if you'd like to just commit what you already have and pass it on to me or someone else. I'll leave a reasonable amount of time before I just start going on things I haven't already worked on to give everyone an opportunity to respond regarding these things we've been working on. I'd like to hear everyone else's thoughts on being able to release by the end of the month (honestly, my goal is to have it ready for a release by the end of the week/beginning of next week, but that might be overly optimistic). Thanks, Christopher
