Proposals about gnucash-gnome2

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 10:05:29PM +0200, Christian Stimming wrote:
> Hi Developers,
> 
> two different issues just popped up about the current gnucash development. 
> First, some latest changes in CVS seem to have introduced unexpected 
> conflicts, though the changes are considered to be of lower priority by many 
> developers here. Second, the pressure for a gnome2-gnucash is increasing 
> all around. I have some proposals as a response to these points, and I'd like 
> to explain these here.
> 
> I think that gnucash isn't that far away from an actual gnome2 release 
> anymore. However, we as a developer team have been lacking a clear 
> communication about the current status, the currently important goals, and 
> the roadmap for the near-future development. I propose that we should firmly 
> restating the actual vision for gnucash and the current view of the  
> developer team on the best roadmap to a gnome2 release. Something like: "The 
> gnome2 port of gnucash is under way. At first, we will try to keep all major 
> features of the 1.8.x release but under the new GUI toolkit. This might be 
> achieved in the next 2..4..6 months. Only after we achieve an initial 
> gnucash-gnome2 series, we will focus on improving the existing features and 
> add brand-new additional features to keep our status as the best free finance 
> manager around." As a relatively easy technical step to underline our 
> commitment to a gnome2 release, I would  suggest to merge back the 
> gnucash-gnome2-dev branch into HEAD. On IRC, David Hampton already agreed to 
> work on this important CVS action.

Sounds like a good plan.

> 
> Related to this is the question about the qof-work, which is not immediately 
> vital for the gnucash-gnome2 port. In my opinion the work in that area is 
> going on well, but unfortunately the goals of the qof-work and those of other 
> developers silently diverged at some point. I think we should clearly confirm 
> that the architectural changes related to qof, including the division between 
> an external libqof and gnucash, are *not* immediatly the focus of the 
> gnucash-gnome2 port. This work should therefore (please, please) *not* 
> interfere with work that improves the gnome2 port and only the gnome2 port. 
> The technical solution to that issue is quite simple: I would suggest that 
> the qof-work should get its own CVS branch (qof-devel or similar), and then 
> those working on qof will be responsible for merging other people's changes 
> into that branch. This will of course be quite easy once the gnome2-branch is 
> merged back into HEAD, so that the HEAD branch will be the point for the 
> gnome2 progress. 

Sounds like a _great_ plan.

> 
> And additionally I would again propose to have a 1.8.12 release, because it 
> contains numerous bugfixes which should be released (please please :). I would 
> volunteer in the tarball preparation and the necessary announcements. 
> 
> An interesting side-effect of a 1.8.12 release is that we as a developer team 
> communicate the fact that we're alive and active and caring about the users, 
> all the while such a release is technically quite easy for us. And of course 
> the respective announcement can be used to communicate the active gnome2 
> progress. 

I agree.

-chris

> 
> Regards,
> 
> Christian
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