Roadmap for 2.6, 2.8

[Geert Janssens]

The recent discussion regarding the core refactoring of GnuCash is very 
encouraging for the future of GnuCash. It will be a lot of work, but at the 
same time will open up new opportunities for the project as well.

While playing with all those ideas in my mind, I also came across a very 
practical question: in what timeframe do we see these refactorings 
accomplished ?

Based on the development pace for that lead to 2.4, I feel the refactoring may 
take well over a year. This is in itself no problem and we don't even have to 
create a fixed schedule.

But at the same time, I would prefer to see more regular major releases in the 
future. Many distos and large projects are now releasing major versions on a 6 
month to 1 year basis. We're not a big project in terms of active contributors 
of course. But having a shorter release cycle keeps the attention more 
focussed. And that goes both for developers as the outside world.

There is one feature I'm particularly concerned about to release "as fast as 
possible": the removal of deprecated libraries. Gnome 3 has been released and 
I think our next major release should really be Gnome 3 compatible. This 
change will take a lot of work in itself already, but can be accomplished in a 
shorter timeframe than the full refactoring in my opinion.

So here's a rough proposal of a roadmap:

2.6 (early 2012 ?)
- replace all deprecated library dependencies
- full unit test coverage of all core libraries
- perhaps some first refactoring of core libraries
- perhaps some small additional features

2.8
- full refactoring of all core libraries
- serious effort towards an improved gui based on the refactoring
- ...

Everything can still change of course, I'm just assessing what is feasible and 
trying to set some focus. What do you think ?

Geert