Roadmap
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[edit] How Features Get Planned
Contents |
[edit] Overview
Experience shows that a normal roadmap with dates and planned sequence of version numbers and what they will contain is completely out of the question for Audacity. We don't have a single person running the show. In any case the classic choice:
"Scope, Schedule, Quality - Pick Two"
applies to Audacity. Roadmaps that attempt to control all three are not realistic.
Instead different team members may (or may not) argue here for their views as to how development should happen going forward.
[edit] Roadmap according to James
These are James Crook's views...
[edit] Stable Releases
- Fully agree with the initiative from Martyn to release often. We've had a huge gap between CVS head and our stable line, and we do not want that to happen again. Stable releases should simply become CVS head with experimental new features switched off. My view is that once we have 2.0 we should be able to release stable every 3 months, cutting features that are just not ready.
- Big new features should be in plug-ins. That makes it so much easier to keep Audacity stable. Cleanspeech, Karaoke and Timer record should become Audacity plug-ins.
[edit] Features
- Option of context help in the preferences dialogs taken directly from the manual.
- Improvements to scrolling and zooming behaviour for close up work. Our code is fast enough to do an oscilloscope style display on P700+, but for that to work well some changes are needed in how we select audio and how we choose to scroll.
- I'd like to see discontinuous selections implemented. This would be a lot cleaner than 'labelled region' operations. It would also drive the code structure that fixes whitespace versus silence issues.
- Re-organisation of menus. These (in my opinion) have grown to be large and confusing. They are partly to blame for the save-export confusion in many users. Making the options under the menu items more powerful reduces the number of menu items we need.
- Fix multi-tool mode so that it can drag clips. This got broken by the introduction of multi-clips making multi-tool mode much less useful.
- Enhancement to screenshot tool so as to screen-capture modal dialogs and menus for the manual.
- The over-due TrackPanel refactor. We need to make it easy for plug-ins to plug-in new track types.
[edit] Increasing Satisfaction in Participation
- Listen for and invite feedback from new contributors. For example the need for better internal documentation in the code was highlighted by both 2009 GSoC students.
- Get across to new contributors that this is a do-ocracy. In general the person who does the work on something decides how it should be.
- Help people increase their own productivity. Spot cases of people pulling in opposite directions early. Turn queries into FAQs. Turn e-mails into documentation. Turn tests into features. Turn closed bugs into development policies.
[edit] Infrastructure
We need to look at these... What we do is up for discussion...
- Bug tracking.
- Translation infrastructure.
- Should we close down feedback@audacity.org and make people use the forum?
[edit] Summer of Code 2010
- Isn't a given. We might decide not to in 2010. If we do, needs a lot of discussion.
