Dear Dev, In case it slipped your mind... we have been planning to do the first RC for the 2.7 release of OpenLayers at the end of this week.
As you all know, the plan for the last two months has been to do the first RC at the end of August, but we have pushed it back already one week. Pushing it back any further will not give us the necessary time to do a series of proper RC cycles and the final release in time for the FOSS4G2008 Conference... which has been our goal for this release since the beginning. Right now, if we look at the tickets page: http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.7 ...we see that there are only 13 tickets left on the plate, 7 of which are up for review. Of the remaining 6, 3 are related to the vector-behavior work. Since the beginning when I proposed the new style for this release (which was unanimously supported, mind you), the plan has been to stick to a date at the expense of finishing every last ticket/feature. The issue we have is that so much work has been done on the vector-behavior that it seems a shame to leave it out of the release. At the same time, I have been told that the code, in its current state, is not really ready to go into trunk. Which leaves us with two choices: 1) Wait until vector-behavior is done to do 2.7 Doing this not only means that we will not have a 2.7 release in time for the conference, but, more importantly, negates the entire experiment we've tried of making a date-based (instead of feature-based) release. Besides the obvious blow to my ego as the official wet-noodler, I think that for all of us this is sort of a sad admission of defeat. 2) Push vector-behavior into the 2.8 release. Allow for the proper completion of the work and its adaptation into trunk, and then do a quick, followup 2.8 release. Reasonable target date could be as early as late October, depending on how quickly the work can be finished. I will personally volunteer to do the work of release manager again -- in consolation to those who will be disappointed/disadvantaged by a 2.7 without vector-behavior. We can do the 2.8 release quickly and painlessly and I will take responsibility to make sure it does. Not being particularly satisfied with either of those options.... Chris Schmidt and I had a phone call this afternoon and he came up with a good idea for a sort of happy-compromise third option: 3) Do the 2.7 rc1 release on Friday, as planned. Give the folks working on the vector-behavior a special exception permit -- just this once! -- to work an extra week (until the rc2, which will be next Friday) on their patches and bring them up into rc2. The official OpenLayers policy is that we do not any non-bug fixes (ie features) after the first RC. However, justification for this special exception is that since the vector-behavior work is completely separate (no interaction) from the main code-base.... the risk of these patches causing any regressions is essentially nil. Furthermore, since it is a brand new feature, there are no applications out there that will be testing it for bugs... so again, it is probably pretty safe. Obviously, the main reason for this special exception is social and not technical: we don't want to disappoint any of the developpers who have worked hard on this patch, but at the same time we do have to stick to our word and follow through on the rules we set out months ago. So, at this point, my plan is to suivre option (3), meaning going ahead with the RC this week. Tomorrow at about noon, I will start drawing up the release notes and the rc1 announcement. Friday morning, first thing I do when I wake up will be to put finishing touches on the notes, make the 2.7 branch, and send the announcement out to the world. What this means to you: you either get your patches coded and reviewed and committed by about 9am Friday, or you get yourself over to Mexico City by tomorrow night and take me out for too much mescal. For the vector-behaviour people... you have another week to get your code all sorted and clean and into trunk -- it goes without saying that if it's not in and ready by rc2... it ain't goin in. :-) As always, please voice your opinion on this. We are hoping that option (3) is a reasonable compromise that will hopefully still allow us to deliver the new release on time. If you don't think it is the right solution, please speak up. This is, and has always been, a democratic project. I like to think that I have the group's authority in drawing the line as I'm suggesting above, but if that is not the case... let me know. (It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it, etc). Finally, I think it is worthy of note at this point that whether the vector-behavior work makes it in to the release or not... we are at this point sitting on a 2.7 release that represents the closing of upwards of 130 tickets... including a ton of bug fixes, a handful of neat new features, many from new contributors to the project... a new gallery interface (http://gallery.openlayers.org), a new FAQ interface (http://faq.openlayers.org), and two new Addins (http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Addins/Bookmark and http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Addins/LoadingPanel). I think it is a great release and will be happy to show it off with the rest of the crew at the FOSS4G Conference at the end of the month. It would be premature to start high-fiving at this point, but we have seen a really great effort these last two weeks -- I personally appreciate the vote of confidence to everyone who has been pushing to get this RC done on time... it is a testament to the unity and the drive of everyone involved in this project. Thanks! Erik _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
