[cairo] 1.10 release schedule

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Thanks Benjamin for bringing this up.  Can we have words from Carl, Chris, and
Joonas?  Chris in particular, what are you doing in your branch?!!!

Cheers,
behdad

On 01/07/2010 04:56 AM, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> 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 outdated.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