Motion to move Feature Freeze to July 23rd

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Daniel,

+1 on the delay.

I would also like to comment that I would like to see additional 
developer documentation in rough added but developers of new features, 
especially those that do not have additional feature development work to 
do. While I know the RFC is supposed to help in this areas it is far 
from complete and often not useful from the how to use the feature 
perspective. I think this is critical on multiple fronts:

1) without dev docs you don't know how to use the new features
2) without dev docs you do not know if the features are complete
3) without dev docs you can not put together a test plan
4) without dev docs the doc staff has little to go on to plan their efforts

So what to we need for dev docs?

1) Not polished docs
2) list of new, changed and obsoleted features
3) how to access each feature
4) what options each feature has
5) how to enable each option
6) I'm sure examples would be welcome if you have them or pointers to 
the msautotest cases

-Steve W

Daniel Morissette wrote:
> MapServer PSC,
> 
> (Please read on, a motion follows at the end of this email)
> 
> Today is our agreed feature freeze date for the 5.0 release. After the 
> feature freeze we enter the 5.0 release cycle (betas, etc.) and only bug 
> fixes can be committed to SVN but no new features or significant changes 
> are allowed.
> 
> We had a quick chat about this on IRC this morning and it seems that I'm 
> not the only one who feels that we are not ready for the feature freeze. 
> I have a few items left on my list that I could not complete in time but 
> could delay until post 5.0. However, there are at least 3 significant 
> items that have not been resolved yet and that it would be nice to see 
> resolved for 5.0:
> 
> 1- AGG: The code is in SVN but we still haven't seen a RFC for this. The 
> consensus this morning on IRC was that a RFC is required ASAP and some 
> changes may be required in light of the comments that come out of the 
> RFC. This cannot happen after the feature freeze as this may involve 
> non-trivial changes to the code.
> 
> 2- Query result caching: have we reached consensus yet? The 2 main 
> options on the table are (1) RFC-22a and (2) the extension of the 
> resultCacheMemberObj to carry a copy of the shape. It would be really 
> nice to resolve this double-pass query issue for 5.0.
> 
> 3- Semi-dynamic allocations of layers, styles and classes: was on my 
> list for 5.0 but somehow I had assumed that RFC-24 had taken care of 
> this already, I checked the code and re-read RFC-24 last week and 
> realized that it was not planning to address this issue. This is another 
> very nice to have for 5.0.
> 
> 
> In light of this, it was decided on IRC to make the following motion:
> 
> ** MOTION:
> To push the Feature Freeze date to July 23rd to allow (at least) the 
> three items listed above to be completed before the feature freeze.
> **
> 
> Note that in order to increase our chances of making the new feature 
> freeze date, we should plan a IRC meeting and appoint a release manager 
> as soon as possible (ideally this week).
> 
> 
> I start the vote with a +1
> 
> Daniel