Re: Reminder of dates

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Michael Meeks <michael ximian com> writes: 
>         And one of my fears about the impending 'Feature freeze' is that  
> we will enter an even more fascist "minimal changes" mode that only allows
> us to add semicolons to the code - thus leaving us with large swathes of  
> easily cleanable but unmaintainable code - that then we are forced to
> maintain in an even _more_ fasicst 'only add whitespace' mode for
> effectively ever.

I think we should accept code cleanups and improvements for the
longest gap possible, freezing only when we have to. The Nov 23 freeze
is for features, not how those features are implemented.

Though, people do need to be careful to avoid "cleanups" that are
half-finished and broken. For example, I have outstanding cleanups
(rewritten session manager, gnome-terminal prefs/session rewrite) but
I'm not going to even propose those for GNOME 2 unless I can get them
noticeably more finished than they are now. On the other hand they are
important cleanups and should hit GNOME 2.2 if I can't make the 2.0
dates.

Taking a panel example, it would be nice to make the panel prefs work
as I outlined in that long document recently, but I do think it's a
huge job, and I'd hate to see it go in half-finished and broken thus
forcing a release delay to get it fixed. gnome_config_ won't kill us,
a substantially late GNOME 2.0 _will_ kill us.

i.e. our initial push right now should be to get stuff to work as well
as in 1.x - so that we aren't "coding blind" - and then all cleanups
should be required to keep things working. If we start on large
rewrites before people are even running the desktop, that is bad.

Before doing cleanups, let's all be running the 2.0 desktop. That
should be the first goal. Then there will be a time when large
cleanups become a bad idea, but I don't think it's Nov 23.

Havoc