Re: GNOME Roadmap - Information request for orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hey Guys:

I'm very sorry I never ended up getting to this.  :-(  For the 2.27/2.28 
cycle, I plan to sit down with the team by the end of this month and go 
over our bug/RFE list to plan for 2.28.

Our general work process is like this:

1) All work we do is tracked via bugs in Bugzilla.  This includes new 
features as well as bug fixes.  All source code changes are attached as 
patches to bugs and we cross reference all bugs in the ChangeLog.  In 
our minds, if something doesn't have a bug number, it doesn't exist. 
So, we're religious about using bugzilla.

2) We take advantage of the "Target Milestone" field of each bug, making 
a milestone for each point release of GNOME (e.g., 2.27.1, 2.27.2, ...). 
The bugs we plan to work on for 2.28 get a target milestone that makes 
sense.  The bugs we don't plan on working on for a release cycle get a 
target milestone of "FUTURE", and the bugs we're not quite sure about we 
leave at "---".

3) At the end of the development cycle, we retarget all the closed bugs 
done during the development cycle to the stable milestone (i.e., a bug 
closed for 2.27.1 gets moved from a target milestone of 2.27.1 to 
2.28.0).  We then delete the development milestones from bugzilla as a 
means to reduce the size of the target milestone list.

We also try to go over the bug list weekly and might retarget things 
based upon feedback/patterns from the user list and new reports that 
have come in.  So, at any given time, our current active roadmap sorted 
in priority and milestone order can be found via a single bug search 
(there are no 2.27.x milestones yet because we haven't gone over the 
list for 2.28 yet):

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?columnlist=target_milestone%20priority%20bug_severity%20assigned_to%20short_desc&query_format=advanced&product=orca&keywords_type=allwords&keywords=&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&order=bugs.target_milestone,bugs.priority%2Cbugs.bug_severity%2Cbugs.target_milestone%2Cbugs.bug_id

We also keep some higher level goals (e.g., refactor XYZ, focus on 
application Q a11y, etc.), but those end up directing how we prioritize 
and target the bugs.

BTW, for 2.28, I'm also working on developing a plan for Bonobo 
deprecation.  This basically means rewriting a HUGE portion of the GNOME 
a11y stack, so it's a lot of work.  The WIKI page I'm using to track 
this is at http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BonoboDeprecation.  It's 
sparse at the moment, but I hope to have some more details filled in 
very soon.

Hope this helps,

Will

GNOME Roadmap Gang wrote:
> Dear module maintainer,
>
> GNOME 2.24 got released a bit more than a month ago and we all started
> looking forward for the next releases; looking forward so much that we
> would actually love to know your plans, get to live.gnome.org to update
> your roadmap page now.
>
> They are listed at http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Modules ; tell us
> about your plans for 2.26.
>
> But there is a twist this time, we want to plan further than the next
> six months: we want to define the major goals for the next two years, as
> the community is willing to implement fresh/innovative ideas that
> improves GNOME's user experience.
>
> Two major ideas came out from the UI hackfest, a new desktop shell and
> file management revamping, we believe those are exciting ideas as an
> initial effort to define our 3.0 release.  But *YOU* are those who make
> GNOME, and we want to read about your ideas.
>
> You will be right thinking two years is a long time, you will also be
> right thinking it is a short time, you know best what can be achieved
> in such a time frame, so think about the overall user experience, be
> free to "break" the current UI (if that brings improvements to our
> users, obviously).
>
> That's it, think over it, discuss it with friends, other developers,
> the various teams, usability, art, and tell us all you want about it
> in the RoadMap pages.  It is very important, as it will also be used
> for our release notes and the press coverage of our next release.
>
> Could you do this for December the 4th?
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>         Frederic, for the Roadmap Gang
>
> PS: http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/ModuleTemplate is a template you
>     can copy/paste for your module.