[elephant-devel] 1.0 Release Planning

[Ian Eslick]

Robert and I have agreed about moving Elephant towards a 1.0 release.   
Elephant isn't perfect, but more and more people appear to be having  
success using it and we feel this kind of predictability is important  
for its ongoing adoption.  The purpose of this 1.0 release is to  
provide a stable long-term platform for users with a commitment from  
us to back patch the release as necessary to fix any significant  
bugs.  It also is a clear statement about our confidence in the  
platform.

The major emphasis from this point forward is test coverage, stability  
and documentation.  I'm particularly interested in documenting more  
use-cases and best-practices.  Alex's discussion of using derived  
indices to make selecting messages by username and dates is one example.

We would like to institute an effective feature freeze as of the  
upcoming beta release, so before we institute that freeze, I'd like  
invite everyone to weigh in on smaller features or annoyances that  
would make a big difference to the utility, usability or stability of  
1.0.  For example I'd like to implement/integrate a dump/restore  
capability to/from XML or s-expressions.

You can see what we've got planned in the elephant trac roadmap:
http://trac.common-lisp.net/elephant/roadmap

Click on any of the milestone there to see the current tickets  
associated with it.

Given that everyone is quite busy, it may take a few months to get to  
1.0.  The best way to contribute to this process is to start using  
elephant-unstable (which I will rename to something less scary) and  
make sure the test suite passes on as wide a variety of platforms,  
lisps and data stores as possible.  In particular, testing the upgrade  
procedure on real applications from 0.9.1 to elephant-unstable would  
be very helpful.

Thank you,
Ian