[OpenLayers-Dev] Heading towards 2.5

[Christopher Schmidt]

I believe in our earlier discussions, we established that we were going
to try for a 2.5 release towards the end of August.

With a 2 week testing period to look forward to, I'd like to start
encouraging people to work on patches for anything that doesn't already
have one. 

Specific tickets I personally consider blockers for 2.5: 

  http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/686 
    Treat Google Layer as projected data
  http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/841
    Create XML Format for cross-browser generation of namespaced XML docs
  http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/638
    add control to drag features
  http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/639
    Add control to drag Icons.
  http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/798
    IE gets errors on controls.html

When I say "I personally consider blockers", what this means is "I will
do whatever I need to do over the next 3 weeks to make sure they get
in. 

There are others that I will do my best to get in, but am not going to
block the release on (personally, not projectwise):
 
 http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/846
   Problem with GML Coordinates
 http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/820
   WFS Race Condition

In addition to these, I'm going to make sure in the near-future
timeframe that any tickets that are awaiting review get proper
treatment. In some cases, that means marking the ticket for commit and
getting it in. In some cases, it means reviewing the patch and marking
it for more work. (In some cases, it means begging some other people to
do review work, since about 6 of the patches awaiting review are mine.)

I'd appreciate if other developers who are committed to working on
certain bugs would also add theirs to this list. 

However, what this means is that some, and possibly many, tickets are
relatively close to getting cut from the release. *This is not a call
for you to cry out in pain for your favorite bug to be worked on.*

Many of the people on this list have great Javascript knowledge, and a
decent handle on how OpenLayers works. If you look at:

http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.5

You will find several categories of existing tickets:
 * Tickets which need tests.
   Usually, these are written by me or some other contributor, and have
   a change to the code, but no accompanying test change. These days, I
   try very hard not to commit code changes without accompanying test
   changes. We have pretty good Unit Tests Writign documentation:
   http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/WritingUnitTests
   and I would be glad to help anyone who is not entirely comfortable
   with writing a test.

   The key thing that a unit test should do is:
    * Fail before a patch is applied.
    * succeed afterwards.
   
   Tests do not have to be complete in every case: simply something that
   ensures that we do not regress is what I'm typically looking for.

   So! If you look at the list of tickets which need tests, and want to
   get involved in getting more fixed into OL 2.5, you can write some
   tests. Again, if you don't feel comfortable -- just ask. 

 * Tickets which need review
   All tickets need to be looked over by an OpenLayers committer before
   they can be put into trunk. However, if you want to help make this
   process easier, you can take existing patches and apply them
   yourself, and add a comment to the bug report on whether htey work
   for you. In addition, you can browse through the code, looking for
   any possible gotchas, and run the tests, and confirm/deny whether
   they pass for you. Having more eyes on the code makes for an easier
   review.

 * Outstanding Tickets
   These are tickets which do not have any work currently done on them. 
   No tests, no patches, and unless a developer takes a serious interest
   in them, have a relatively small chance of making the 2.5 cut. 

   Presenting a serious interest can be done by:
    * Investigating.
      Find what's going on in the ticket. This sometimes means following
      an error message back to its source, and finding why it is
      happening. 
       Examples:
       http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/693 
         Problem with Layer Grid.js:moveTo() function with Gmap with an
         overlay
       http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/666
         EditingToolbar does not display first segment in VML until 3
         points added
         
    * Hacking out a demo:
      Cases where a new feature request is made usually just require a
      demo of the functionality, if it's small: from there, the code can
      be cleaned up and turned into a patch with tests by other users.
      (Or you can do it yourself)
       http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/472
         overviewmap should display cross when getting too narrow
       http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/766
         add controls for adding/removing geometry parts

I think we should plan on having an IRC meeting the first week in August
to establish what is going, and what is staying. 

I'll pick 3 dates: 

  Wed, Aug 1, 2007
  Fri, Aug 3, 2007
  Mon, Aug 6, 2007 

I understand it's difficult to pick a time at which our core developers
are all available -- damn worldwide development! I can typically do any
time betweeen 9am and 8pm -- since Tim and Erik are west of
me, the latter is probably a better target. 

Who else is interested in participating in a meeting? Note that
participation indicates at least some level of interest in doing
development on at least one bug over the following two weeks: the goal
here is not to provide an avenue to deluge developers with 'fix my bug' 
requests, but to provide a discussion forum for developers to announce
what they plan to finish before a freeze, which I think is appropriate
for mid-August. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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