[kaffe] Production release planning

[Jim Pick]

Hi,

I'd like to collect some ideas for what we should do for the upcoming
production release.  I'm planning to number that one 1.2.0, keeping with
the Linux-kernel style numbering scheme (which could be potentially
confused with Sun's JDK numbering scheme, unfortunately).

Our current production release is 1.0.7, which is more of a placeholder
than anything, since there wasn't a lot of testing done on it, and we
really haven't been supporting it or updating it.

What I'd like to us deliver sometime this year is a "real" production
release.

What do I mean when I say a "real" production release?

If I place myself in the shoes of a potential user of a "real"
production release, I'd have certain expectations:

 a) that the production release is relatively bug free.  If there are
    bugs, they will be fixed.  Security holes will be patched.  New
    releases will be made as needed to fix bugs.

 b) that the APIs are stable and complete, and I could use them and
    build on top of them without fear of them being changed on me.  If
    they do have to change, the change will be managed in a way that it
    won't break my software (eg. by using versioned libraries, etc.)

 c) that experimental or incomplete code is marked as such.

 d) the release comes with complete set of documentation.

 e) there is a list of "supported" platforms, backed by regression
    testing results.

Our current 1.0.7 release doesn't really work well as a production
release, so I do feel that we should replace it with something better as
soon as we can.  That said, we should decide on some goals and criteria,
and take our time doing it to make sure we have something that we will
be proud of, and happy to continue supporting.

I'd really like to see stable production version of Kaffe that can
seriously be used as a "building block" for other free software.  It'll
involve a fair amount of grunt work to stabilize, test and package a
production release, but in the end, I think it'll be fun to have a nice
final release that we can showcase, and that regular non-developers can
use.

Cheers,

 - Jim