Gentlemen,
A few months back, we had an increase in activity related to a possible
release of FlightGear 0.9.11. After the initial pre-release, things fell
silent again. Most of us probably know that Curt has been forced to cut back
on his FlightGear time, mainly for reasons beyond his control. This makes it
increasingly harder for him to find the time to get the release out the door.
In the days following, I notified Curt, that I would possibly be interested
in taking over some duties related to the release process. As it is right
now, I won't be taking over full responsibility, but assist in doing a lot of
ground work.
Until now, I didn't really find a decent chunk of time to actually do much
work, other than collecting some ideas and shaping up a plan. This morning, I
had the first opportunity to look at the code, and to some prepartory work
(more on that at the end of this mail).
One thing I think we all agree on is that we would like to increase the
release frequency drastically. As of late, the release frequency has been
falling to less than a year, and the latest release is dated April 2006. My
initial goal would be to initially increase that frequency to 3 releases a
year, as that seems doable in terms of my time-constraints. In addition, I'd
like to set more or less fixed target dates for each new release: 1 around
February 1st, one around June 1st, and one around October 1st. Prior to each
release, we should have a fixed one-month feature freeze to iron out any
bugs. This way we'd have a fixed cycle of 3-months of development, followed
by one-month of bugfixes-only. Sticking to a fixed schedule has the advantage
that everybody knows where we're at, which makes it a lot easier to plan
incorporating new features. If anybody has reasonable objections agains this,
I'd be happy to hear about them.
As for my own duties, there are some things that I can do, but there's also a
lot of stuff I can't do. The things I can do include:
- Test and update autoconf dependency checks
- Roll up tar files of FlightGear source / SimGear source / base package
- Write the announcement message
- Try to keep the release process on track (with cooperation of the other
developers that is. :-) )
What I probably can't do include the following items:
- Keep an up to date changelog
- Build the Mac/Windows binaries
- Maintain the website.
Having said that, today is September 1st, and according to my proposed
schedule, that would imply start of the feature-freeze period. Without any
prior announcement, that is quite an unreasonable request. :-) However, I
would like to pick-up the pieces and try to get the existing FlightGear-plib
out the door in the forseeable future. I started doing some preparatory
groundwork by wiping my linuxbox clean of all the dependent libraries and
tried to build FlightGear from scratch.
Right at the beginning, I found one significant problem: FlightGear / SimGear
require plib-1.8.4, but this version no longer builds on my box (using gcc
4.1.2). I'm getting the following compiler error:
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/durk/src/plib-1.8.4/src/ssgAux'
if
g++ -DPACKAGE_NAME=\"\" -DPACKAGE_TARNAME=\"\" -DPACKAGE_VERSION=\"\"
-DPACKAGE_STRING=\"\" -DPACKAGE_BUGREPORT=\"\" -DPACKAGE=\"plib\"
-DVERSION=\"1.8.4\" -DHAVE_LIBPTHREAD=1 -DHAVE_LIBGL=1 -DHAVE_LIBDL=1
-DSTDC_HEADERS=1 -DHAVE_SYS_TYPES_H=1 -DHAVE_SYS_STAT_H=1 -DHAVE_STDLIB_H=1
-DHAVE_STRING_H=1 -DHAVE_MEMORY_H=1 -DHAVE_STRINGS_H=1 -DHAVE_INTTYPES_H=1
-DHAVE_STDINT_H=1 -DHAVE_UNISTD_H=1 -I. -I. -I../../src/sg -I../../src/ssg
-I../../src/util -g -O2 -Wall -MT
ssgaCelestialBody.o -MD -MP -MF ".deps/ssgaCelestialBody.Tpo" -c -o
ssgaCelestialBody.o ssgaCelestialBody.cxx; \
then mv -f ".deps/ssgaCelestialBody.Tpo" ".deps/ssgaCelestialBody.Po";
else rm -f ".deps/ssgaCelestialBody.Tpo"; exit 1; fi
ssgaSky.h:107: error: extra qualification ‘ssgaCelestialBodyList::’ on
member ‘ssgaCelestialBodyList’
ssgaSky.h:195: error: extra qualification ‘ssgaCloudLayerList::’ on
member ‘ssgaCloudLayerList’
make[2]: *** [ssgaCelestialBody.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/durk/src/plib-1.8.4/src/ssgAux'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/durk/src/plib-1.8.4/src'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
This problem is fixed in CVS/SVN, so it would be natural to require plib-1.8.5
for the next version. That version isn't released yet, however. The most
reasonable approach would be request a new release of plib, like we have done
many times in the past. The question is, however, whether that will happen in
the foreseeabel future. So we should seriously think of a backup plan.
Comments are appreciated.
Cheers,
Durk
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