[kaffe] Planning for 1.1.3 release

[Dalibor Topic]

Hi Jim,

Jim Pick wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It's getting to close to that time again.  Isn't having a regular
> release schedule fun?

Yep. I'd actually propose a faster release schedule: once a month after 
1.1.3. There is so much changing every two months, that the steps 
between releases are quite huge, so that people following developer 
releases instead of CVS may have a harder time reporting bugs based on 
releases only.

> 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.

Good to see you're back up again, and beaten the cold. I have been 
fighting with something nasty in my throat last week myself, but it only 
hurts when I breathe :)

> 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.

It would be nice if you could layout the plan for the DocBook 
transition, so that we can focus on fixing kaffe to work with the 
required apps, if possible.

> 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)

I'm not so optimistic about a stable release that soon, as I don;t think 
we should really cut that one based on time passed alone, but also 
define a list of features we want to see in, as well as platforms we 
want to see run, applications we want to offically list as supported in 
1.2 etc. For example, I think we shouldn't release 1.2 before the switch 
to GNU Classpath is completed.

> 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

Aleksandr did some work on this. I have the code, but I didn;t have the 
time to test it.

> - 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.

- Merge our fixes back to Classpath (that's what I'm doing now. I don't 
know if I'll have time for anything else in the next two weeks, since 
the diff is *huge* and selling all the patches to GNU Classpath 
developers is hard work. While we tend to spot their bugs & fix them, 
they tend to spot our bad changelogs, lack of tests and comments, and 
demand that those are fixed first ... and someone has to do it, anyway, 
as it's quite hard to resync with Classpath without those patches going 
in one day ;)

- Fix the build bugs
- Merge in inetlib and jacorb
- Man pages for all kaffe executables
- Fix supreet's gtk AWT
- Pull in new AWT stuff from james/helmer when it's done

Looking over the things that I wanted to see done for 1.1.2, I see that 
half of those are now done ;) The rest:
- Getting gjdoc in.
- Adding more docs on what third party components are used in kaffe,
where they came from, what the licenses are etc in THIRDPARTY
- a THIRDPARTY-CHANGES file documenting the changed files with respect
to Classpath, for example
- merging the outstanding patches in (long mail from michael)
- fixing the libtool-vs-static-vm problem pointed out by Kiyo and Andrea
- fixing the libtool-vs-cross-compilation problem pointed out by sebastian
- fixing the long standing broken strtod replacement issue for Linux 2.0


Longer term things to do:
- Get GL4Java to work
- Ask Jean Daniel Fakete about license change to Agile2D to be able to 
include it in kaffe.

> 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.

I'm glad to hear it's actually working for something, browsing the list 
traffic I sometimes catch myself thinking: how are we ever going to fix 
all these bugs ... ;) But I guess that's just the effect of kaffe 
getting better, and more people trying it out where it hasn't been tried 
out before (or for a long time ;)

cheers,
dalibor topic