[vtk-developers] development roadmap?

[Lisa Avila]

I think what need are more frequent (and scheduled) "releases" of VTK. It 
would be great if VTK could be released every 3 months - this way 
developers could move up four times a year to a new version of VTK that is 
stable. The downside to this is that each release takes quite a bit of time 
to do right, so I don't think this sort of release schedule is possible.

Our method here at Kitware is to work with the nightly release during the 
active development stage of a product (such as VolView or ParaView). When 
we get close to wrapping up development and moving into testing mode, we 
wait for a relatively stable day in the life of VTK, branch it, then keep 
an eye on the changes made and move the necessary bug fixes made on the 
main tree into our branch.

Maybe we can have a not-quite-a-release version of VTK by imposing a 
"freeze" on feature changes (allowing only bug fixes) for one week every 
few months or so. At the end of this week VTK should be fairly stable. We 
can tag VTK at the end of the week, and folks could check this out as a 
"good" intermediate version of VTK.

Lisa


At 06:14 AM 3/27/2002, Will Schroeder wrote:
>Hi Michael-
>
>There are important points here. I can understand the difficulty of 
>keeping up with a moving target. As you say, we can help you help us; 
>although I think part of what you are saying is that there should not be a 
>"you" and "us", just an "us".
>
>Would a single web page, something like a "Developers Page", with current 
>version information, a road map, proposed changes, and pending changes, be 
>something that might work? It sounds like we need information (maybe a 
>variant of the style guide) which indicates the current process for 
>creating a class.
>
>What do you think would be the appropriate number of mini-releases per 
>year? How do you see numbering them?
>
>I'm concerned about freezing the CVS repository. Would might happen is 
>that instead of a torrent of changes, you'd have a series of floods each 
>time the gates were opened. These impulse functions create a lot of 
>dynamics... Maybe we could do short freezes around the releases....make 
>use of code branches more.
>
>I'm thinking about it....
>
>Will
>
>
>
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