[kaffe] Planning for 1.1.3 release

[Jim Pick]

Hi,

It's getting to close to that time again.  Isn't having a regular
release schedule fun?

Here are the upcoming dates I'm shooting for:

Sunday, November 30, 2003 - Feature Freeze for 1.1.3
Sunday, December 7, 2003 - Release 1.1.3

If I've been somewhat quiet lately, it's mostly because I've had a real
nasty cold for the last few weeks, and I've got a few side projects on
the go that are eating up my project time.

I promised some DocBook documentation, and I haven't done it yet, so
that's still the highest thing on my personal priority list.  I feel the
lack of structured documentation is really holding us back in a lot of
ways -- I've got a plan, I just need to make some time to do it.  I
still need to polish off my regression testing reporting framework as
well.

If anybody else has some goals for this release, please follow up to
this email.

This should be the last development release before we get serious about
putting together a real production release.  Here's the dates I have
penciled in for that:

> Sunday, January 18, 2004 - Feature Freeze for 1.2.0
> Sunday, January 23, 2004 - Release Candidate - 1.2.0-rc1
> Sunday, February 1, 2004 - Release Candidate - 1.2.0-rc2
> Sunday, February 8, 2004 - Release 1.2.0 (Production Release)

Now for some wishlist items about the top things I currently care about
(feel free to add what I've missed):

- Improved documentation
- Improved testing
- Improved processes for keeping in sync with projects such as Classpath
- Enough NIO support to get the latest builds of Freenet and Ant working
- More testing and bugfixing on the verifier and security APIs
- Make Kaffe work as a Mozilla plugin
- Improved profiling and debugging support
- Fix the Cygwin port, and Mac OS X port (eg. working PowerPC JIT).  If we
  have decent support for all the major desktop environments, we might win
  some users over.
- Easier support for graphical apps, with the ability to switch between
  multiple AWTs at run-time, etc.

Again, these are wishlist items, so I'm not making any promises that we
will deliver these.  But I'm definitely willing to throw in some of my
own time to help drive these forward.  I'd be really happy even if we
just make a small bit of progress on these items.

Sun will kick out Java 1.5 in the Spring, I think, so we'll be playing
catch up once again.  But it would be nice to have a really solid
production release in the Spring that we would be happy to say we
support.

I'm pretty amazed by how far Kaffe has come in just the last few months.
I use it everyday now (primarily for webapps), and I'm very happy about
that.

Cheers,

 - Jim