Gangplank:
Well, I was hoping to get a release together in time for the
nice simple release date of August 1, but it didn't work out
that way.
It's taken more effort than I expected. Oh well, so much
for nice simple dates!
I've wasted too much time contemplating version numbering
schemes, for one thing. I've come up with a scheme that I
think would be neat for the Linux kernel, but it's serious
overkill for my project. Nevertheless, I'm gonna use it
anyway. Something's gotta be the guinea pig! I've got a
good description written up for it now; it's amazing how
many hours this part alone took... (I'm sure it's too
complex for my own good, but I wanted to give it a try.)
I still need to review the code to make sure I don't release
anything overly brain-damaged to the world. I have a couple
known kludges that I'm considering trying to clean up before
the release, such as having the help text hardcoded into
strings in the executable! There was a good reason for
this; I've been extremely wary of the possibility of
blocking file I/O, since the server is single-threaded.
However, there's nothing to stop me from reading it in
during the server initialization code (except lack of Round
Tuits). It would be cleaner that way...
And there are the more mundane things, like renaming the
system internally, stripping old RCS log messages from the
source code (should I keep using $Log$, I wonder?) and
applying the QPL license to each module. (Yes, I'm starting
with the QPL, at least for now.)
Then there's documentation, of course. The only
documentation that I have at the moment is the description
of the versioning system, which turned out to be fairly
difficult to write up in any sort of comprehensible
fashion. (It's hard enough to read now, but the earlier
drafts were much worse.) I still need to write at least
some basic documentation. (A code overview would be nice
too.)
And I haven't even gotten as far as worrying about things
like CVS, a web site, mailing lists, or any other auxiliary
things. I'm just trying to come up with the initial
tarball! *sigh*
I suppose this was inevitable; the project is nearly nine
years old, and I never really expected it to be easy to put
together a clean release archive. But I wish it were easy,
all the same!