[Alexandria-list] Are you alive? Yup!

[Cathal Mc Ginley]

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On Thu, 5 Feb 2009 18:54:27 +0100
Leandro Regueiro <leandro.regueiro at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> are you alive? is still Alexandria in development?

Hello,

well, I'm still here at least. Development on Alexandria is fairly slow
and tends to have very long lulls with no progress. At the moment I'm
working on fixing a few of the outstanding bugs so I can release a new
version sometime this month. The problems I tend to have are:

1) I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I don't like releasing a new
version which I know still has bugs. I should probably just do more
releases, and more frequently.

2) The code is getting a little bit "crufty" these days, after being
modified by several waves of developers who weren't familiar with the
original design but had to pick it up as they went along. This
untidiness makes working on the code difficult, and leads to a couple
of hidden bugs. A bit of refactoring might go a long way here.

3) Some of the design decisions taken by the original designers
(Laurent Sansonetti et al)  are limiting the evolution of the program
(for example, only one copy of a book per library). This is natural,
it was originally designed to deal with small personal book
collections. I've been coming up with alternative, more flexible
designs by means of a ground-up redesign (which I call Palatina), but
progress has been slow. Once the next bugfix version of Alexandria is
out, I'll start discussing the new design on this mailing list.

Anyway, my current plan of action is to figure out some of the
most pressing bugs which can be fixed within... lets say the next week.
I'll be going through the Tracker on RubyForge flagging the bugs I'm
targeting for 0.6.4 as Group "Next Release". Then, I'll do a string
freeze for the translators (most of the translations are up do date,
and there are several new translations since 0.6.3 too). And finally,
hopefully, I can push out a release of 0.6.4 around the end of February.

I'd welcome any suggestions to help with the bug-fixing and testing.
I'll keep the list notified about any progress.

   -   Cathal Magus
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