Well, last night I got an alpha grade (imho) release set up on source forge and today I got it posted on forums.pcbsd.org.
It is some what ahead and behind schedule in the same regard, I originally planned to release a mock-up (non functional but ‘looks’) around the new year. Instead I’ve taken a few weeks to push on a head to some thing that actually works.
I had also road mapped a beta with a few more features then are currently ready to be released between Jan 2008 and June 2008 but it’s more likely that I’ll hit a 1.0 by June… hehe. So I’m both behind and ahead of my time goals. Software Schedules are not really some thing I believe in setting in stone, so much as setting a point on the calendar some where between when I expect to be done by and when I think it should be done by.
Since making use of SVN was not in my original plans I do have a bit to consider now.
I want to continue coding so I can keep the pace of development going. But I need to consider the chances of bugs being found in any one that actually tries the snapshot I released. And I do not want to muck with merging branches later if that happens… The stuff I released is not complete but it should be fairly stable, or I wouldn’t have let it hit SVN >_>.
What I am thinking is to limit my self to continuing things in the trunk that need to be done without effecting the released code much. Which is copied to the tags directory so it’s saved in SVN. Then after about a weak or so, go back to un-restrained work. So I can deal with things like redoing the NPM_DisplayDialog the way I would like to redo it.
Before I am willing to bump status to Beta, I want to have NPM able to update the ports tree (portsnap/cvsup/csup) and configure ports. I tested the config gui awhile back before taking the code to sourceforge but I never got it fully working. I need to figure out just how I am going to get a connection between checkboxes and options that I can parse back out of the GUI.
I should also make it look for stored configurations rather then just in the makefile.[0]. Those two things are really what I am interested in coding feature wise. I also want to remove the dependancy on psearch because it really is a simple app and we might get a slight performance boost.
I also want to fix the translation systems up a bit, work on another prototype of the NPM_MainWindow user interface style and do some concept art for NPM’s configuration dialog. I don’t expect a GUI way of changing NPM’s settings to be released until RC status though.