Looking back, and forwards!

This seems an appropriate moment to look back at the past
year, and also
forward to the next.

A year ago, we were nearly two months after the release of
0.9.9
(2006-11-09), yet 1.0.0 was still 4.5 months away
(2007-05-17).  We did
put out a 0.9.10 release in between (2007-03-04), consisting
of 0.9.9
plus backported bug-fixes, but I feel this was still much
too long an
interval between releases.

Mostly this was because we pretty much decided upon the
features for
1.0.0 and then worked towards them.  I think we need to
balance features
against time better in future.  It would have been hard to
have picked
out a much reduced subset of the Unicode/UTF-8 related
changes, but
these weren't the only changes.

Also, in hindsight, I think we probably merged the UTF-8
branch into the
trunk too soon.  Ideally we want to keep trunk as close as
possible to a
state we'd be happy to release - then we can easily decide
it's time to
hold back some planned features and make a release. 
Developing new
features on branches can help here, though it has its own
problems.

Once 1.0.0 was out, we achieved our aim of making a new
release about
every 1-2 months (5 releases in about 7.5 months).  These
releases
included some exciting new features (e.g. spelling
correction, synonyms,
user metadata, OP_SCALE_WEIGHT, more flexible sorting of
results), some
big efficiency improvements for various cases, and a good
sprinkling of
bug fixes.

The documentation has improved - in particular we now have a
series of
"topic" documents to complement the
doxygen-collated API documents.
There's also a growing amount of useful information on the
wiki.

Our testsuite has also improved - both the harness which
runs the tests
and also the breadth of the test cases themselves.  We're
trying to
ensure all new functionality gets suitable feature tests,
and all
bug-fixes get a regression test.  Not all existing features
have feature
tests, but we're gradually plugging gaps in test coverage
when we notice
them.

Looking forward, we are hoping to release 1.1.0 in the
earlier part
of this year.  Currently (http://wiki.xapian.org
/RoadMap) we're guessing
March, but we'll probably have a better idea once we start
deciding what
features we want in it.  The wiki RoadMap details some
planned and
possible goals.

On a more personal note, my girlfriend has got a new job in
New Zealand
for the next two years, so we're going to be moving there
from the UK
shortly (in just over a week if the visa paperwork is
actually sorted
out by then!)

We'll be in Lower Hutt (near Wellington) if there are any
New Zealand
based Xapian users reading who would like to meet up.

Aside from living the other side of the planet, I'm
intending to keep
working on Xapian much as I do now, though it may be a few
weeks before
I have a permanent net connection.  I've earmarked some
things to look
at which are self-contained, but this may affect when 1.0.6
and 1.1.0
happen.

I'm also going to be rather busy packing, etc until we
leave.  Hopefully
I can get Search::Xapian 1.0.5.0 released, but I don't think
I'll have
time to also sort out applying the two sets of changes which
have been
submitted.  Sorry about that.

Cheers,
    Olly

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Looking back, and forwards!

Thread: Looking back, and forwards!