[gnome-db] post-GUADEC plans

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

Hi

I've been this week in Dublin for GUADEC (http://www.guadec.org), and I
come with very good news for us.

I've been talking with Martin Sevior, from Abiword, about a GNOME Office
release in August. Because of that, we talked about the following
things:

* libgda/libgnomedb should reach a 1.0 version at that time. And,
looking at the current status, it seems we can punt some functionality
originally planned for 1.0 and concentrate on stabilizing the current
codebase, writing documentation, fixing crashes, etc.
Thinking about this, it seems to me a good idea, since I have to agree
that the objectives for 1.0 have been large too much (reports, graphics,
lots of providers, etc). So, freezing now (or in a few weeks time so
that some new features can be added for a little while) could help us in
making more widely known our work. Also, it seems to me
libgda/libgnomedb (5 years old) really need a 1.0 ASAP.
The punted features would be marked as post-1.0 work, and we can even
CVS branch and have people work on post-1.0 while we prepare 1.0. So,
this means development would not be stopped. I will myself (and I hope
other people too :-) concentrate on 1.0, but won't stop anyone to work
on other things.

* unfortunately, I don't think Mergeant is ready for 1.0 yet, so all
this would mean that we would decouple libgda/libgnomedb and mergeant to
be separated releases. A worst consequence of this could be that
Mergeant is not included in the GNOME Office release. Or do you think
with a bit of bugfixing mergeant, with its current features, can be
released as a 1.0 software?

* we would need to take advantage before gnumeric/abiword freeze for the
August release to come up with some new DB-oriented features in those 2
programs. Both use libgda now, but I guess they could use it for more
cool things that would allow users to operate with their databases from
these apps. The only problem is that I'm out of imagination on this
topic, so I'd appreciate having ideas from gnumeric/abiword users (I'll
post a message about this to their lists as soon as we agree on the 1.0
plan)

so, what do you think?

Another good news :-) The people from igalia (http://www.igalia.com)
have used libgda for their ERP app (http://www.fisterra.org) after
having tried with Java, and libgda was 40/50 times quicker than the Java
technologies being used (SOAP, JDBC IIRC what they said in the talk). So
yeah, we're ready for 1.0 :-)

cheers