[bt-devel] Towards a 1.7 release - what is missing, who can help

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

First I want to say that I have bee a bit silent for a while for several
reasons. I try to find time for BT again. I may tell more about my
situation later if there's something important.

On Wed, 30 Apr 2008, Martin Gruner wrote:

> Dear fellow developers,
>
> we are  getting much closer to the point where we can and should release 1.7
> to the public ("release early, release often"). QT 4.4 should come out very
> soon, which is the only remaining external dependency we have to wait for.
>
> What is left to be done?

> 	* Bookshelf manager: complete new implementation (Eeli)
I will fix some bugs. I have been thinking about the install destination
path selection and would like to add a dialog page for that.

> 	* Missing icons: collect missing icons
I can do at least some of these. It just needs some time and
inspiration.

> 	* Search analysis: broken, I don't mind if we disable it for 1.7
I would disable it. Last time I tested it crashed even without changing
any code, I traced it to KDE libs. It's very easy to comment out the
"Analyze Search" button from the UI.

> 	* Anything else?

Should we disable the keyboard shortcut configuration? It's broken and
will only confuse users.

The old KDE bug where the paged dialog page selector shows only one item
and can be browsed only with PageUp/PageDown has re-appeared with
Kubuntu 8.04. We have to port the config dialog to our own new paged
dialog some day. Should we do it now or later? If later, there will be
two kinds of paged dialogs which is not nice. Personally I want the
public x.0 release to be ready for critical users and reviewers. Alpha
and beta can have these kind of small deficiencies but .0 should be
consistent.

Drag and drop does not work atm in all situations. At least bookmarks
need it.

It's not fun to try and test all features but someone really should do
it. Especially those things which are not visible: all shortcuts, drag
and drop etc.

>
> Who can help with finishing these final points? Is there anything else to be
> done before the release?

What about the Sword (filters) support? Is there something important to
change?

> We should at least prepare one beta and have a string freeze phase for the
> translators to update their files.

I can also look through the UI strings.

>
> Also, from now on we should start adding to the change log again. For the
> changes from 1.6 to 1.7 I created a summary item which probably is
> incomplete. Is there anything missing? It currently has:
>
> 	* Port to KDE4/QT4, reduced KDE dependency to a minimum
> 	* New build system: cmake
> 	* i18n of UI strings is now handled by QT
> 	* Massive code cleanups and internal refactoring
> 	* New bookshelf manager
> 	* Bookshelf improvements
> 		* Separation of works and bookmarks on two tabs
> 		* Different work grouping types supported
> 		* Hide/Unhide feature to select which modules should be displayed
> 	* Corrections and enhancements to session management
> 	* Search dialog now has a history for the modules to search in

Maybe we should also notice those things which we have removed: shortcut
config, possibly search analysis - what else?


One more thing. Will the final release number be 1.7 or 2.0? Should we
move to 2.0 when we get rid of the KDE? Could we have betas which are
ready for consumption and would be packaged for distros etc? We have so
much new code that there will definitely be bugs, inconsitencies and
defects in the first stable release. It would be only honest to call it
beta. If you have seen the battle over the KDE4 version numbering you
see what I mean. The version numbers create surprisingly great
expectations and disappointments. "Beta" would be very appropriate here
where there surely will be rough edges.

  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)