Roadmap for 2.6, 2.8

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Tue May 17 10:25:36 EDT 2011


On May 17, 2011, at 1:54 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:

> 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 ?


Finishing test-writing by the end of the year is reasonable. If the refactoring work was limited to cleaning up the object hierarchy and making code more maintainable (the sorts of things Martin Fowler writes about in his canonical book on the subject), that could be done in a year, too. In our case, more extensive surgery is required, so I think we're looking at two years (i.e., finish in 2014). 

Have you started on the registry rewrite? I'm concerned that that might take more than the remaining 7 months in 2011. There's a lot of code in there, and it is IIRC the main user of those deprecated libraries.

When Gnucash migrated to Gtk2, the devs of the day bumped the major rev from 1 to 2. Should we do the same again, or wait for the refactored core? 

Regards,
John Ralls



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