[check] Status and Progress

A few quick words on current status and what happens in the near future...


As y'all may or may not be aware, I've been pretty much swamped lately and
as a result been AWOL from Validator stuff. Hopefully the worst of that is
over now and I'll have my normal copious amounts of free time to work on
Validator. :-)


AFAICT, Validator is in reasonably good shape. There may be some charset
issues remaining, but I got the feeling from Martin that the brunt of it
was sorted. That means I have only one issue outstanding before calling a
public beta, and that is updated MathML 2 DTDs (which ought to go in today
or tomorrow depending on how much grief they give me).

How about the rest of you? Anyone else have anything that needs to be
addressed before a public beta period?


Going forward I'm thinking we'll call a public beta ASAP. I'll advertize
the hell out of it anywhere I can think of (mailinglists, newsgroups, etc.)
and hopefully we'll get all the "Dude, you *suck*!" messages _before_ we
update :80 with the new version this time. :-)

Depending on how much and what kind of feedback we get I'm now aiming to do
the final release around the middle of November. The reason being simply
that it looks like I'll be able to take two weeks off work at the end of
November (Week 47 and 48, Nov. 17-30, probably) to work on fixing any bugs
or perhaps start work on the next version.



And speaking of the next version...

I was initially going to keep that a relatively minor thing to keep the
release cycle short, but since these things seem to take over a year no
matter how carefully scheduled, I'm now thinking of just ripping it
completely to pieces and going wild.

In particular, I'm thinking of splitting "check" into (at least) two
pieces; the CGI bit containing the logic, and a Perl module containing
pretty much all the subroutines with a little OO interface sprinkled on
them. And, for extra kicks, I want to strip out all embedded/hardcoded HTML
snippets from the code and replacing them with a templating system
(probably i18n-ing the validator in the process).

That's probably more then enough to completely destabilize the code for a
good clip so if anyone thinks we ought be a bit more carefull now is the
time to holler before I go wild. :-)


To prove I'm not completely reckless, I intend to split off the current
release version of Validator onto a branch ("validator-0_6_0-release" or
summat) where bugfixing for :80 can take place. If anyone has trouble with
CVS branches I can put together a mini-howto for dealing with them in re
Validator.


Anyways, enough braindumping. Any comments?

Received on Wednesday, 16 October 2002 15:39:04 UTC