Hi guys, I've started this discussion with Gustavo and Cedric back in Prague, and haven't had time to check my mails until now (doing it from the airport). I will summarize the stuff I've told them and i'm sorry if I'm repeating some of the things that were already said in this thread. I will then answer specific stuff I've read.
E17 *needs* a release, there is no doubt about it, and it needs to happen sooner rather than later. I believe the only reason it was never released is because "there is no such thing as a complete/perfect software", The way E17 is right now is not much better than 4 years ago. You think people will complain "I waited years for this???", no, I think they will complain "they could have released this 4 years ago!". As such, since no software is ever complete, it means that a release will never happen if you have to follow the whole idea of feature-complete (or even 'after this TODO list is done). You actually need to set dates, and then *make your features fit in your timeline*. As for "it's not ready", no, it IS ready, it's been ready for the past 4 years (although a bit more buggy back then, but it still kind of is), and if you look at the 'disaster' of gnome 3 and kde 4, you'll know that they can completely fuck it up, but it won't matter because 3 months later, they'll have a new release that fixes all the important things (the actually important ones, not the ones that the devs think might be important) and they doubled their user base and everybody forgot about the annoyances they originally had! You release "now", in the release notes, you make it clear what exactly is missing and promise to get it fixed by next release (with a hardcoded deadline for that release) and people will not complain.. at least, most of them won't, for those who will, ignore them, because no matter what, people will complain, God created the earth and life in all things, and yet people complain that He doesn't exist... see my point ? You need to stop being scared of offending the very few ingrates out there, and actually do the right thing for the majority of grateful users who are depending on you. As for the release cycle, I suggested someone gets assigned the specific role of release manager, his task would be to take care of doing releases (and code in between of course), and if a release is not done on time, it is his responsability/fault/whatever. The task of the release manager is to make sure that the goals for the next release are reached on time (means yelling at others if necessary) or to drop features for the next release. He will take care of maintaining the release schedule wiki page too. The release schedule will need to have set goals and dates. Look at the gstreamer release schedule wiki page for example, they give you the exact dates for the feature freeze and for the release of the next 3 versions. This is what is needed here, people must know that they can expect a fix soon, and not in another 10 years. And frequent releases definitely gives a lot of exposure to the project, which is needed. Now about the TODO and "release as-in" (Gustavo) versus "finish these features first" (Carsten) philosophies. I looked at the TODO with cedric a couple of days ago, and quite honestly, it was ALL low priority. There is nothing in there that absolutely has to be done before any kind of release so they can all be dropped! But I don't necessarily agree with a "release it now as-is" either.. I agree with cedric's view of releasing an alpha (what I call a release-candidate) in a couple of weeks when efl 1.1 get released. Get your features in the core from now until then (in 2 weeks, right?) and then the release candidate can be released, at which point a feature freeze of 4 weeks must be set, no more. 4 weeks later, the actual release HAS to happen. Between the RC1 and the final, no new features are to be added, but bugfixes can (and should!) get committed. So what I'm saying is, you want dual screen support (oh God, please, I need it!!! :D) then do it from now until the 15th of December (does that date sound nice?) you want a better taskbar? then get it in right now. You need the keyboard layout thingy, then get started! Then when the RC1 gets tagged, that's it, no more features, and start bugfixing whatever you can find. I think this should please both parties, since Carsten himself said that these missing features should only take weeks to implement, right ? So now's your chance to prove it and get it done in the next 2 weeks, because if you can't, then trust me, 2 years from now, we'll be having this same discussion in which you'll say it will only take a few more weeks to implement these other features that are absolutely necessary for the release. Do a break; or continue; or even a goto; or whatever you need to do, but you need to stop this infinite loop you've been in for the past 10 years (and yes, I know that what was written in the past 10 years is huge, but no releases kind of means it was for nothing). Oh another point I wanted to make was that, now the E community is very small (compared to gnome/kde) and the only way for it to expand is to get a release.. again, think of gnome 3 and kde 4 initial releases, they were missing tons of stuff and were unstable, but by making the release, they were able to get people motivated to actually fix the issues they were having. I'm fairly sure that after a release, you will get a lot of new contributors and those elusive TODO items that never seem to get fixed will finally have someone working on them. Right now, with no releases, you have no exposure, so no new contributors and not enough resources to actually do the release you seem to want... Now that's pretty much what we discussed back in Prague I believe. If I forgot something, I can always --amend my mail later on (oh yeah, POST-release, it might be good to revisit the question of the version control system). As for the specific questions, I think the release must be 'englightenment 0.17.0' and not 'e17 1.0' . As for the taskbar, I've always used 'taskbar' which worked fine for me but was pretty annoying in terms of auto-resize/scroll content, and if it gets too big it would shift the content of the shelf outside the screen. I just tried the 'itask' module now and it seems to be more intelligent, so I've now switched to it. Yes if you right click on it, it doesn't give you the module's settings, but it adds a sort of small icon at the start that you can use to configure the module and serves also the purpose of bringing a popup with the available windows (kind of like taskswitcher module). I have no opinion on the high level language, python/JS. All I know is that gnome shell is written with JS. As to Mike's comment about the release TODO was decided upon and it shouldn't be changed. I think you missed the point of this whole thread... nothing is written in stone and this thread has the task of rediscussing what that TODO list means and to redecide its content. As for the 'rush it', no, I don't think it's being rushed, it's stable and it's pretty much complete, there is no point in delaying it (which might be forever), you can't say it's being rushed after spending the last 10 years planning this moment. Yes, there are missing things, but nothing is (in my opinion) critical enough to block the release. And like I said above, you still got 2 weeks to get those missing features in.. if you can't do it in that time, then it will never happen in my opinion. That's pretty much it from me, I will reply to any new comments (yeay for having internet now (== in about 12 hours)!) KaKaRoTo On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 5:34 AM, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri < barbi...@profusion.mobi> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 3:28 AM, Carsten Haitzler <ras...@rasterman.com> > wrote: > > On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:51:53 -0400 Christopher Michael < > cpmicha...@comcast.net> > > said: > >> Agreed. But to 'jump the gun' and release early (read: earlier than > >> ready) at this stage is just silly. Take a little more time, finish the > >> work properly and have a Good release !! rather than a half-arsed one. > >> Hell, we've hammered on this for more years than I care to > >> count...what's a few more months ?? ;) > > > > thats actually another point - its not months - its weeks. > > Let's hope so. We've been saying that for years. > > And old time E community is weird. At some point is "who cares about > users?" and at another is "but users will complain". > > Also, be realistic. While we old time geeks are all about ranting > GNOME3 and Unity they are stronger and stronger everyday. Don't let a > few whining people disturb your view of the whole picture. They loose > few kernel hackers that will happily move to "awesome" or "fluxbox", > but get dozen thousand users that will never know what is phoronix and > thus will not answer it there. TBH "happy users are quite". > > > -- > Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri > http://profusion.mobi embedded systems > -------------------------------------- > MSN: barbi...@gmail.com > Skype: gsbarbieri > Mobile: +55 (19) 9225-2202 > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Get your Android app more play: Bring it to the BlackBerry PlayBook > in minutes. BlackBerry App World™ now supports Android™ Apps > for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™. Discover just how easy and simple > it is! http://p.sf.net/sfu/android-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > enlightenment-devel mailing list > enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Get your Android app more play: Bring it to the BlackBerry PlayBook in minutes. BlackBerry App World™ now supports Android™ Apps for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™. Discover just how easy and simple it is! http://p.sf.net/sfu/android-dev2dev _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
