[OpenLayers-Dev] 2.7 on the Horizon

[Erik Uzureau]

Dear dev,

Hola, amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but
things in Boston have been hot and I haven't had a spare minute for
OpenLayers for months.

With the FOSS4G 2008 Conference coming up, some of us have been
looking at the 2.7 release page[1] and brainstorming as to whether or
not we might have something new to show in Cape Town.

A quick glance at the list shows that we've already closed about 40
tickets from the 2.7 milestone... certainly doesn't hold a candle to
the nearly 300 closed tickets from 2.6, but then again since when have
we been in the candle business?

In the wake of 2.6 and generally over the last few months, there has
been a lot of talk of doing more regular, smaller releases. What if we
give it a try? Put our elbow grease where our mouth is, if you will.
The rally cry, then, is...


Let's show the world OpenLayers can do a Full Release in 2.5 Months!


Back when I used to work in the software industry, we used to say,
"Time, Resources, and Work... you can only fix two of them." Now that
may sound goofy, but I think it's a reasonable game plan. The
resources we have (people hours) are pretty much fixed by themselves,
so if we're fixing the time, then that leaves us with Work as the
floating operator in the equation.

What this means, quite simply, is that instead of our usual hanging
around and waiting for all the appropriate tickets to be closed before
making a release (bending time for work), this time around we are
going to have to take the not-quite-fixed bugs and the
still-debating-it features and simply push them off into the 2.8
release.

It is, to be sure, a distinctly different approach from releases past.
But OpenLayers is still a relatively young project, and the people
that build it are some of the smartest and most agile developers out
there... so if ever there has been a time to experiment with something
new, that time is now.

History says we generally take 2-3 weeks to go from rc1 to a final
release, so I figure if we set the target date of September 1 for 2.7
rc1, then we can safely predict a final release of 2.7 to show at the
conference at the end of September.

What do you think?

I've talked this over with both Tim Schaub and Chris Schmidt and they
both seem to be in favor of giving it a shot. I think it would be good
for us to hear what other people think of this idea so please voice
your support or concern here to the dev list.


I'm going to start today by doing a pass through the tickets and
sifting out those which I don't think will get done in time for the
September 1 RC, so that we have a clearer picture of what is possible.
Given the time frame and the number of open tickets, the majority of
what will end up in 2.7 will be bug fixes, rather than features, and I
think we should all be comfortable with that.

Now It goes without saying that if I move a ticket that you think is
really important, you should feel free to move it back (but please
include a clear comment as to both "why" you think it should be in 2.7
and "how" -- ie who is going to do the work). Overall I think we will
see a lot more ticket movement in general, since we will be keeping to
a hard deadline.

I will be out of the office and off the internet for the next three
weeks on holiday (por fin!). On return, I will be heading out to
Boston, where some of the TOPP developers will be getting together
with the OL team at MetaCarta for a week of concentrated work on
OpenLayers. Hopefully after that week we will have a much clearer
picture of where we are in terms of what can be squeezed into the 2.7
release, so that we can spend the month of August developing like mad
and tying up loose ends.


In closing, I ask once again that you voice your opinion on what I've
proposed in this email. It goes without saying that we need the
support of the whole community to pull this off, so it will help all
of us to hear what you have to say. Furthermore, if you have time over
the next few weeks, take a look over the tickets that you are
interested/involved in and try to think seriously about whether or not
you can help them to get done and into trunk by September 1.


Thanks in advance for your comments and participation!
Erik

[1] http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.7