Project Status
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
We had tentatively selected today as the starting date for the Inkscape 0.42 release process. I sense people have been looking forward to this day, and are ready to see a new Inkscape release. :-)
It's been quite a while since our last release, and so many of our newer developers don't have first hand experience with our release processes. Here's a brief run down of what we usually do:
First, we enter a wrap up phase called the "Frost", where developers are encouraged to bring any features they've been working on to a suitable state for formal release, stop adding any new features, and to start focusing on bug fixing. Generally this phase only lasts for a week or two.
Next, we enter a bug fixing phase called the "Feature Freeze". We identify some bug fixing goals, using a scoring system that folks have found to give a fun challenge. A list of "must fix bugs" is also generated, that the developers want to see fixed before a release is allowed; we usually don't get every one of these bugs fixed, but we certainly try to leave as few open as possible. I will be posting daily reports on our bug status as we go. Translations, documentation, release notes, and so forth also need to be updated and finalized. This phase can go on for several weeks, depending on how bad the bugs are.
Once all of the must fix bugs are fixed and all the objectives have been met, we enter the "Hard Freeze" phase. Two "Freeze Wardens" are named and all development is done as patches submitted to the freeze wardens for review and integration. This phase is intended to be quite short - a matter of days. This is intended to give us a final QA focus.
Finally, we tag and branch the codebase, create the packages, and proceed with the release. :-)
For Inkscape 0.42, I estimate that going through this process will take on the order of one to two months. It is driven largely by how quickly the bugs can be fixed, so please plan on contributing some time to this effort this month, and hopefully we can make swift progress towards our goal.
Statistics May 15 Jun 1 ========== ====== ====== Max Week's Rank on SourceForge: * 38 Total SF Page Views * 1,935,964 Total SF Downloads * 254,647 Total Freshmeat URL Hits 18,691 19,149 Total Freshmeat Subscriptions 181 183 Lines of Code in src/: 373,651 374,180 Code lines 259,984 260,236 Comment line 67,053 67,136 Blank 53,244 53,443 Lines of Docs in doc/: 26,848 27,790 Lines of content in website: 39,865 42,490 Size of the Inkscape wiki: 27,052 26,729 Bugs open/total: 208/1196 215/1223 Features open/total: 442/ 712 453/ 728 Patches open/total: 11/ 221 11/ 230 CVS Commits (as per inkscape-cvs) 11,897 12,040 Inkscape-devel membership: 173 179 Inkscape-announce membership: 197 202 Inkscape-user membership: 242 248 Num Translations: 33 33 Ave Translation Ratio: 47.0 47.8 * - Statistics unavailable
