[cairo] cairo 1.0 and future plans

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 25 Aug 2005 13:04:39 -0700, Carl Worth wrote:
> As far as the "more to be done" goes, I think it's worth some
> discussion now as to how future releases should be done.
> 
> Obviously, there are things we wanted to get into the 1.0 release that
> didn't make it, (for example, non-experimental PostScript and PDF
> backends, the glyph cache rewrite, etc.). Do we want to plan some
> short-term feature-based releases for these things?

We've talked about some of this in IRC already, so I'll summarize what
we have so far.

First, we've got what I think should be a reasonable versioning
scheme planned out. I've just written this up and added it to the
online documentation. You can find it at:

http://cairographics.org/manual/cairo-Version-Information.html

(Or something similar. I don't think we have stable URIs for our
documentation yet, and I think I'd prefer the trailing portion of the
above to be "cairo-version.html" or better "cairo-version" or maybe
just "version".)

Anyway, please read the above to understand the versioning scheme.

With that scheme in mind, we have now set up a branch tag of
BRANCH_1_0 which if checked out from CVS will currently compile cairo
with a version of cairo of 1.0.1. Compared to version 1.0.0 that
branch contains only bug fixes, and we will soon be creating a
maintenance release 1.0.2 from the branch. For this maintenance
release, there are two things that cairo developers should be aware of

  1) As a policy matter, all bug fixes committed to HEAD should also
     be committed to the BRANCH_1_0 branch.

  2) We need a list of bugs that should be fixed before 1.0.2 is
     released. Nominations can be made here on the list. I'll offer to
     maintain the list in cairo/ROADMAP (more on this below). If
     someone wants to setup a 1.0.2 tracking bug in bugzilla that
     could work too.

Meanwhile, the head of CVS now has a version of 1.1.1 and is the place
for major new work to land. We already have keithp's glyph cache
rewrite there.

I think it's important that we get a 1.2.0 release out "soon" that
improves on the deficiencies of the 1.0.0 release, (ie. the primary
themes should be getting non-experimental PDF and PS backends, and
fixing known bugs in 1.0.0 such as non-dashed curves).

One thing that really helped as we worked for 1.0.0 was that we
started with a release date, (in that case provided by GNOME).  Then
we maintained a list of desired features in cairo/ROADMAP and we
dropped some features as the time remaining proved them to be
infeasible.

I'd like to take a similar approach for 1.2.0 and future releases. I
haven't heard any suggestions on release scheduling, so I'll propose
an almost totally arbitrary release date of 2005-11-01 for 1.2.0 which
gives us 2 months to finish it up.

I've added a hack to the cairographics website[*] so that the latest
version of cairo/ROADMAP as it exists in CVS can be read at:

	http://cairographics.org/ROADMAP

As I'm writing this mail, that file still contains the old 1.0 list,
but I'll be revising it quite soon to include the 1.0.2 and 1.2.0
plans we're talking about here.

Anyone should please feel free to make other recommendations for what
should go on that ROADMAP. The long-term release-scheduling question
is still wide-open in my mind, and I think we need input from authors
of cairo-dependent libraries and applications to answer that.

-Carl

[*] The rewrite hack also makes other frequently changing CVS-hosted
documents available with similar URLs, such as:

	http://cairographics.org/NEWS
	http://cairographics.org/TODO

as well as less-frequently changing bits of documentation that exist
in CVS:

	http://cairographics.org/README
	http://cairographics.org/CODING_STYLE
	http://cairographics.org/PORTING_GUIDE

(Oh drat, I just realized that some of those that should be in the
released tar files haven't been making it there.)

The rewrite hack just so happens to currently make the latest versions
of all files from the "cairo" CVS module available too. But I don't
think I'll guarantee that a URL like this will work reliably in the
future:

	http://cairographics.org/src/cairo.c

It is kind of fun to have this sort of CVS-based wiki though.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/attachments/20050902/105ddde5/attachment.pgp