(this is posted in Team internal and there is a reason for this. Please keep any details of this post non-public, you’ll see why that makes sense later.)
Sorry, this is going to be long.
Friends, it’s that time of the year again where I suddenly realize I am kinda managing this project and figured out we should push a release soon. It will not be the most amazing major release ever, but it still has some nice contents to it, including:
- Mentions in comments will be a thing.
- Stream rendering for people who ignored a profile with a lot of tagged posts will be improved.
- It will be the first release that ships Federation v0.2.0, which is amazing enough that it got its own blog post.
- We now have a markdown editor on comments and conversations as well, making the process of using markdown there a lot easier.
- And, last but not least, we will ship first steps for the account migration feature!
Now, if you watched carefully, you’d realize that the last two points are not ready yet, and here comes where the kinda adventurous part comes in.
So, you remember last year, I hope. Some of the core devs (well, all of them), were meeting up at a camping event and the timing was great, so we decided to live stream the release there. So. This year, it’s, uhm, different. We did plan the camping event as well, and it will still happen, but because of issues with finding a place, the timing is off by a week in relation to our diaspora birthday.
The thing is… the camping will not be one week after our birthday. It will be one week ahead. We’re meeting up from 18th to 20th this month. Sadly, we will miss @jhass this year, but @supertux88, @svbergerem and me still will be there.
Last year, our little release stream attracted a lot of attention (even from people who usually do not care), and we had a lot of fun. So, me being naive, thought, it would be great to do the same this year.
Now, let’s talk about the issues with this idea. If you do the math, that would be 12 days to the release if we release on Saturday. That is… uh… not much time. If you followed GitHub, I unassigned some issues from the 0.7.0.0 milestone. Effectively leaving only Senyas pull requests that really block a possible release. Everything else, we can easily ship in the first minor after that.
Before suggesting this idea to the broader community here, I did some preparation. Here are some thoughts.
- I pinged @comradesenya last week and asked him about his opinion on this timeframe. The short answer is: he is happy to try to finish the work, but it obviously depends on a lot of factors. There is an agreement of interest, but no guarantee. That very cool, and fine.
- @supertux88 is a bit skeptical about the short window, but not opposed.
- Inspired by rambling around at night with @supertux88, I figured he is mainly concerned about not having enough time to run long freezing periods. However, I am somewhat relaxed on that, since we have large pods (Nerdpol, diaspora-fr, Geraspora) running on the develop sources, so I am confident we are at least not destroying everything.
So, here is my suggestion for a plan.
- Let’s go ahead and target the 19th of August as the release day for 0.7.0.0, but let’s not make this public.
- Let’s all help @comradesenya finishing his work by any means we can. No matter if it’s review help, answering questions, whatever. Let’s try to make this happen.
- If you feel like it and you do know your way around the frontend, look at #7250, but let’s not make this blocking, we can fix that in a follow up minor release.
- Let’s prepare our usual major release publicity, including a blog post that highlights the contents. Include everything I mentioned above (including the unfinished PRs from Senya), since we will not release without them.
I will decide no later than Wednesday, 16th, if we mange to hit that Saturday or not. I will make that call, since I’ll be the one preparing the live stream thingy, so it feels appropriate. However, obviously, I will not decide against the group. This is also the time where, if so, I will announce the stream publicly.
Case 1: We cannot make the date
Nothing happens, really. We will simply go ahead and release whenever we are done. We will have the announcement and other stuff prepared, so we did not really lose anything here.
Case 2: We can make the date
Cool. I’ll take responsibility for hosting a live streaming event on Saturday evening (a time that should fit for everyone across the world, except for our non-existent Asian community). if we can manage the date, I’ll actually spend some time preparing this, since merely showing how we type git commands into the console is not that cool. So, my plan is to…
- Talk a bit about the general project history for people joining the first time
- Talk about what happened since we released 0.6.0.0, picking highlights from all that year
- Talk about some highs and some lows in the development, how opensource development is going, …
- Give an insight about our team, who is working on what, why everyone is working in diaspora, …
- I want to have something about every team member, including our community team. i will ask everyone individual to provide the information they want to have public.
- If you want, you will have the opportunity to join a mumble server, introducing yourself and talking a bit about your motivations!
- Talk a bit about what may happen in the future, what large tasks we are working on, …
- (actually release 0.7.0.0)
So, ideally, we end up having an hour or so of stream, with a lot of fun and a lot of information in it.
Looking forward to feedback. What do you think about the timeline? What is your opinion on the release? What do you think about my streaming event proposal? Anything else you want to share?
Since I’m probably busy with rails 5 and senyas PRs, can you 