[Banshee-List] Developers: Gearing up for 1.5.0

[Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com>]

First to report on the GIT migration. Unfortunately it has not gone well
for us. I have little information on what exactly has gone wrong and
when it will be fixed. Here's what I do know:

  a) Our tags and branches were improperly migrated, possibly losing all
history other than the last commit

  b) The 'master' branch was properly migrated, and it's /more than
likely/ safe to be pushing to this branch.

With (b) in mind, let's not block any longer on pushing here. If there
is a problem, we will make sure that no commits are lost, even if we
have to rebase from svn again. Everyone just make sure you are always up
to date so we at least have distributed backups :)

Also, please make sure you use a proper git workflow where you make
fairly fine-grained commits (not necessarily pushing) that cover a
specific feature (or logical subset thereof) or bug fix. Do not make
commits that cover 800 different unrelated changes.

With this commit mentality, we do not need to use the ChangeLog any
more. Commit messages should be of this form:

[One short sentence/line description of the commit]
[blank line]
[Multi-line detailed description of the commit]

Please do not use a period at the end of the short description (first
line).

Now for 1.5.0:

We would like to release soon, but there are a number of stability and
possible data issues that I will block the release on. These must be
addressed first.

I created a 1.5.0 milestone in bugzilla, and would appreciate it if bugs
that need to be fixed for this release marked as such (set target to
1.5.0) and have proper priority and severity. Any data loss or major
crashes (regressions from 1.4.3) should be marked as "BLOCKER" for the
1.5.0 target.

These two are specifically on my radar:

 - http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580044
 - http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579370

Additionally, there was some serious performance regression from 1.4.x
due to the SQLite provider switch. Some of this performance has already
been gained back (thank you Bertrand and Gabriel), and Gabriel has
started working on a performance test suite so we can track future
regressions (but hopefully improvements!). 

We must keep performance in mind, and I would really like to see 1.5.0
fully on-par or better than 1.4.3 performance wise. 

I would like us all to keep the fantastic WebKit performance mantra in
mind whenever changes are made:

"The way to make a program faster is to never let it get slower."

I would further encourage all developers to read their page on
performance: http://webkit.org/projects/performance/index.html

When the performance suite is more complete, I would like to fully adopt
the WebKit policy - any performance regressions must be fixed or
reverted immediately.

Additionally, I would like to stress that we should not be introducing
breaking changes in the database (or APIs, though we can have some more
flexibility here). That is, databases created with 1.5.x should work
reasonably with 1.4.x. There should not be many compelling reasons to
introduce breaking changes, and any that arise must be discussed
thoroughly. 

Finally, everyone should be testing and developing against Mono 2.0.1,
especially if you are using C# 3.0/LINQ features. There are still issues
in Mono 2.0.1 with these features that otherwise work well on Mono 2.4.
We will take on a Mono 2.4 requirement in 6-12 months.

So let's get the 1.5.0 bugs in shape, and release soon!

Thank you everyone for your hard work and dedication. You are much
appreciated.

Cheers,
Aaron