[cairo] 1.10 release schedule

[Chris]

Hi Benjamin,

I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here as I've only recently joined the list. I still couldn't help but try and bring up a point some may have missed.

Windows accounts for 90% of (consumer) operating systems in use worldwide.

It would be only fair to assume that most developers are writing software for Windows (because that's where most of the money is to be had).

I would also venture to guess that the more accessible a project is, the more developers it will attract.

However, in my opinion, the Cairo project is not very Windows-friendly. I have yet to successfully build for Windows - yet I have no problems compiling other libraries and I've managed to build for OS X with no problems to speak of.

I fear that, perhaps, other developers have given it their best once or twice and just given up.

If it were easier to build on Windows, I think you might have a larger developer pool with which to work.

One suggestion might be 1 officially supported Windows compiler/system with clear-cut instructions on how to build it that work (instead of "lots of ways to build Cairo").

If I'm way out in left field here, let me know. I'll be quiet. Meanwhile, I'll keep trying those many ways to build :-)

Christopher

--- On Thu, 1/7/10, Benjamin Otte <otte at gnome.org> wrote:

From: Benjamin Otte <otte at gnome.org>
Subject: [cairo] 1.10 release schedule
To: "Cairo list" <cairo at cairographics.org>
Date: Thursday, January 7, 2010, 2:56 AM

Hey,

I've been wondering about the 1.10 release. I'm pretty sure we'll not
make all the ambitious goals from the hackfest[1] unless some sort of
wonder happens. (That's almost obvious after all the stuff going on
with the developers' real lifes...). But:

- I had expected at least one prerelease.
This seems to be the biggest issue: There's noone pushing for releases
or doing any sort of QA (ensuring make check keeps working, revieweing
APIs, ...). Most of the developers seem have wandered off either to
their own branches (I know at least Chris, Mozilla and me are guilty
of that) or are doing something else entirely (probably the rest of
us). I suspect we need a release manager and don't have one. I'd like
to avoid having to be that person because I do way too much other
stuff and don't know the code well enough, but if noone steps up to
doing it, I'd volunteer.

- We don't have a release schedule
I fear that if we do not commit to some sort of schedule, we'll not
get a 1.10 release out in time for the next round of distro releases.
And I really really want to avoid distros shipping 1.5 years old code
when we could do so much better. Not because of the new features or
performance, but because there's actually developers that care about
the code (see also next point).
Pixman seems to manage the 6monthly releases synced to distros pretty
well and it'd be nice if we could manage to do that, too.

- There's no branch everyone agrees on should be 1.10
In fact, we have 3 branches that could qualify: 1.8, master and
ickle/wip/compositor[2]. (Almost?) everyone agrees that 1.8 is
outdated. I know because whenever I mention a bug or performance
problem the answer is "Oh, that code. I replaced that with
$NEW_AND_AWESOME in $BRANCH". But it's the only branch that succeeds
in running the testsuite.
Then there's master. Master is quite a bit better than 1.8 (both in
perf and features), but it fails the testsuite rather spectacularly
and doesn't see much work (the last month only saw 4 tiny fixes). So
there's noone really pushing it forward.
And then there's Chris' compositor branch that is seeing active
development. It's even better than master (in performance, features,
and probably the testsuite, too). Unfortunately it's a 50.000 line
diff to master in src/ only and has no convincing git log.

So what now? Thoughts? Opinions?

Cheers,
Benjamin

PS: I actually wanted to write this with my new @redhat.com email
address to a) make this sound more official and distro-concerned and
b) include the information of my new employer for everyone who doesn't
read my blog, but I had forgotten that big companies fail in setting
up new accounts quickly.


[1]: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoHackfest/Conclusions -
see Timeline section
[2]: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~ickle/cairo/log/?h=wip/compositor
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