Re: Milestones document

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 5 Dec 1999, John R. Sheets wrote:
> How are things progressing?  Anyone have a feel for when the gnome-libs
> 2.0 API freeze might take place?  January?  February?  Later?  What's the
> official target date (or is there one?)?
> 

No official date, as always in free software "when it's done."

However, I think the feeling is that gnome-libs is almost ready. For API
completeness we need:
 - freeze gnome-vfs API and merge it into gnome-libs
 - add GnomeFileSelection to gnome-libs
 - freeze GtkHTML and merge into gnome-libs
 - move GtkXmHTML to "compat lib" (well, it will just remain as a separate
   lib but maybe only optionally built)
 - write some compat library stuff
 - finish port of ZvtTerm to gdk-pixbuf
 - a long list of canvas/iconlist related stuff (cleanup canvas items,
   finish some libart things, canvas printing, finish new icon list)
 - finish DItem and do an editor widget for it
 - Not sure what's up with gnome-print, we might need to put that
   in too, but whether it's ready for prime time I don't know.

This should all be doable by January, except the canvas and maybe printing
stuff, as long as people don't decide to do any huge gnome-vfs or GtkHTML
rewrites or feature additions; and if people do decide to do that my
impulse would be to dump those features from gnome-libs for this release,
or alternatively kick those people in the butt. ;-)

If we can slushy freeze API by the end of this month (say December 31),
port apps in CVS (making small changes to the API if it turns out we need
to), then really freeze around the end of January or end of February, and
stabilize for a month or two while focusing on applications. Then release
gnome-libs around end of March/April.

If we decide to move to GTK 1.4 though, that will push us back a month
perhaps; also, we may or may not want to release gnome-libs when we
consider it ready, we may want to wait until we are ready to release some
apps.

Actually a couple months ago I was wanting to release gnome-libs in Spring
before the new desktop stuff, but now I'm thinking it makes sense to go
ahead and stabilize everything as a whole (meaning libs + desktop,
excluding apps). This still means we need to freeze gnome-libs in a month
or two, but not release until Summer-ish. We'll decide when the time comes
I guess.

Who knows! We do need to start winding down gnome-vfs and GtkHTML though,
and stabilizing them for gnome-libs inclusion and so we can port apps to
use them and build apps on top of them. We can't have these libs changing
all the time (like, ahem, gdk-pixbuf, ahem) once we are using them - which
means both they need to be ready before using them and once in use they
have to be near-frozen.

It does look like we're in good shape on the desktop front though - HEAD
panel is nice, and essentially done according to George and Jacob,
gnome-fm is finishable by summer if all goes well, help browser
replacement is moving along, and Sawmill is looking nice.

Havoc