Hi guys,
Now that the vacations are behind us (well, behind me at least :)), it's time
to focus on converging MacRuby for its first stable release, 1.0. My goal is to
release it somewhere in 2011 (the sooner the better :)).
In order to smoothly achieve that goal, it's also time to accelerate the
current release system and improve the way we classify and address incoming
bugs reports. After talking with the others committers we decided on the
following:
1) Much more frequent releases
Starting from now we will release more frequently. Until we reach 1.0, releases
will mostly contain bug fixes and improvements, and practically no feature. As
a matter of fact, I intend to release trunk as 0.8 next week. By releasing
MacRuby more frequently we hope people will also test MacRuby more frequently,
and report more bugs.
2) Better bug management
We have too many bugs registered in the tracker, and it's a pain to manage all
of them. Starting from now, we will classify all existing bugs as well as
incoming ones in two categories: for 1.0 and for later. We will then only focus
on bugs for 1.0. The second step is to reduce the problem into a small test
case (if applicable) then attach the #reduction keyword. Once bugs are properly
reduced, we can fix them more easily. We intend to attach a keyword to bugs
that seem to be easy to fix, this way new comers can help and learn how MacRuby
works.
3) Bug smash days
We will organize bug smash days. They will happen on an IRC channel (details
forthcoming). The first one will happen this saturday, 6th December. We will
have people from 3 different time zones (US west coast, Europe and Japan) on
the IRC channel, and our first task will be to start managing all the bugs,
using the method described above. New comers are greatly welcomed and we will
make sure everyone who wants to help can help.
4) Compatibility support page
The big challenge for MacRuby 1.0 is to have excellent Ruby compatibility. We
currently have 2 metrics to test our Ruby compatibility: RubySpec and Rails.
However it's not enough, there are lots of Ruby libraries and C extensions
around that we can't afford to test by ourselves. Therefore, we intend to
prepare a webpage on the website that lists Ruby libraries that are known to
work with MacRuby, and those who don't run yet. We will make sure the community
can easily update that page. Having an updated list of libraries that we should
run should help the team fixing compatibility bugs.
That's all for now, bug if you have any suggestion on how to improve the
current development process, please let us know.
Laurent
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