Re: 1.4 release?

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2000 battery841@mypad.com wrote:

> Hey guys,
> 	I know that this is for gnome-dev more than this, but when is
> 1.4 expected for release?  It sounds like we have a lot of small
> changes for 1.4, but I have not yet heard a goal for release.  Im just
> curious.
> Kevin

The current target is mid to late October.

It is not yet clear which changes in the help browser we (ie. Ali :) will
have done in time.

Here are some possibilities, in roughly increasing order of difficulty
(and decreasing order of likelihood):

1) Just minor updates to docs, still using gnome-help-browser.  (ick)
2) Move to Nautilus, still using HTML and no new features.
3) Nautilus with XML docs
4) cross-referencing
5) contents listing (either OMF or else a hack)
6) indexing
7) searching
8) glossary
9) access to documents on the Net via OMF

I'm not sure where the line will be drawn. Hopefully we can get at least
through #4.  I'd really like to get up through #6 or #7, but Nautilus will
be freezing in not too long, so I'm not sure how realistic this is.  Ali
has been working hard on making our new system work well, so I am
optimistic.  However the other Nautilus developers are busy with the other
Nautilus components, so we may not get much help from them on things which
are only important for the help system.  As for the OMF work, it is not
clear how far we can get.  Once we have a dedicated developer, it should
not take too long.  Right now, we have people working on the
DocBook/autoconf end of things, but we still need somebody to work on the
main library.  We do have the option of whipping out a quick and dirty
OMF-based system which gets the job done without all the bells and
whistles.  (Writing the basics should not be too hard.)

Ali - How far do you think we can get on this list?

For us writers, the first four should not be much work.  If we do #5 or
#6, we will have a fair amount of work to do - writing metadata and/or
indexing every document.  We will want to start working on this as soon
as we are confident the features will ship with GNOME 1.4.

Other help components: 

1) pop-up help - This won't happen until GNOME 2.0, as it depends on
Gtk+2.0.
2) hints - This could happen soon if we feel it is important.  We would
need to convince George to make it a priority.  We would also need to
write the hints for some applications, which would not be too much work
and would be fun.
3) demo/tutorial wizard - Similar to #2.  If we decide it is important, we
can probably convince Jonathan to release a version we can use.  

Dan