[Xapian-discuss] Looking back, and forwards!

[Olly Betts]

This seems an appropriate moment to look back at the past year, and also
forward to the next.

A year ago, we were nearly two months after the release of 0.9.9
(2006-11-09), yet 1.0.0 was still 4.5 months away (2007-05-17).  We did
put out a 0.9.10 release in between (2007-03-04), consisting of 0.9.9
plus backported bug-fixes, but I feel this was still much too long an
interval between releases.

Mostly this was because we pretty much decided upon the features for
1.0.0 and then worked towards them.  I think we need to balance features
against time better in future.  It would have been hard to have picked
out a much reduced subset of the Unicode/UTF-8 related changes, but
these weren't the only changes.

Also, in hindsight, I think we probably merged the UTF-8 branch into the
trunk too soon.  Ideally we want to keep trunk as close as possible to a
state we'd be happy to release - then we can easily decide it's time to
hold back some planned features and make a release.  Developing new
features on branches can help here, though it has its own problems.

Once 1.0.0 was out, we achieved our aim of making a new release about
every 1-2 months (5 releases in about 7.5 months).  These releases
included some exciting new features (e.g. spelling correction, synonyms,
user metadata, OP_SCALE_WEIGHT, more flexible sorting of results), some
big efficiency improvements for various cases, and a good sprinkling of
bug fixes.

The documentation has improved - in particular we now have a series of
"topic" documents to complement the doxygen-collated API documents.
There's also a growing amount of useful information on the wiki.

Our testsuite has also improved - both the harness which runs the tests
and also the breadth of the test cases themselves.  We're trying to
ensure all new functionality gets suitable feature tests, and all
bug-fixes get a regression test.  Not all existing features have feature
tests, but we're gradually plugging gaps in test coverage when we notice
them.

Looking forward, we are hoping to release 1.1.0 in the earlier part
of this year.  Currently (http://wiki.xapian.org/RoadMap) we're guessing
March, but we'll probably have a better idea once we start deciding what
features we want in it.  The wiki RoadMap details some planned and
possible goals.

On a more personal note, my girlfriend has got a new job in New Zealand
for the next two years, so we're going to be moving there from the UK
shortly (in just over a week if the visa paperwork is actually sorted
out by then!)

We'll be in Lower Hutt (near Wellington) if there are any New Zealand
based Xapian users reading who would like to meet up.

Aside from living the other side of the planet, I'm intending to keep
working on Xapian much as I do now, though it may be a few weeks before
I have a permanent net connection.  I've earmarked some things to look
at which are self-contained, but this may affect when 1.0.6 and 1.1.0
happen.

I'm also going to be rather busy packing, etc until we leave.  Hopefully
I can get Search::Xapian 1.0.5.0 released, but I don't think I'll have
time to also sort out applying the two sets of changes which have been
submitted.  Sorry about that.

Cheers,
    Olly