[Scummvm-devel] 0.9.0 plans

[Max Horn]

Hi folks,

Eugene asked me yesterday about 0.9.0. We both thought that we don't  
want to wait half a year for that... in fact I think it would be  
great if we could make releases every, say, three months or so  
(ideally, it would be nice to have a "roadmap" or so, but that  
requires a lot of dedicated people whoa actually work on fixed  
milestones, so I am afraid that's not too realistic for us right  
now :-).

Still, a 0.9.0 shouldn't be too far away. Essentially, we need to  
finish the GUI code, and make sure our ports get up to speed. In  
particular, this time I would like to see an official PalmOS  
binary :-). Maybe an official NintendoDS binary, but I am not sure  
how realistic that is, either.

Of course, we also need to go through the bug tracker, fix  
regressions etc...

Regarding new engines, of course it would be nice to get kyra, cine,  
lure up to speed for the release -- but to me, that's not such a high  
priority right now!


So, how about starting planning for this now. We released 0.8.0 on  
2005-10-30, 0.8.1 on 2006-01-31, 0.8.2 on 2006-02-08. So it's already  
4.5 months since our last major release. How about this rough release  
schedule:
  0.9.0 around 2006-05-15 (with GUI finished & ports ready; possibly  
other goals we need to define)
  0.9.1 around 2006-06-05 (bugfixes)
and then
  0.10.0 (or 1.0.0 ? hrm... we still ain't got not docs <sigh>)  
around 2006-09-01

The idea would be to start on this *now*. If we want to make any  
OSystem changes that will affect porters, we should do them *now*,  
i.e. within the next 10 days or so (I am mainly thinking about the  
RGB color API here -- since I got absolutely no reaction on that, I  
guess I'll just do it, if it breaks anything, at least people will  
start complaining, instead of sitting silently :-).

Then, get maintainers to update their ports *immediately*. I.e. we  
tell them on 2006-04-20 (latest) when we plan to make the release,  
then urge them to start updating their ports *now* so that we  
determine early if there are problems and can either reschedule the  
release, to give them more time for the fix, or let the port slip and  
defer it to 0.9.1...


What do you think?


Cheers,
Max