plan
Here's a rough idea of our plan. This is a statement of intent by a group of volunteers, so don't rely on the dates/functionality expressed here!
0.7.*
Releases in the 0.7 series are unstable and slow, and only suitable for the most adventurous of end-users. They are snapshots in the development of the product towards 0.8.0
0.8.0
This will be the first stable release. We hope to be here by August 2004. It ought to:
- Allow loading, editing, and saving of all well-formed XML documents, in all languages, with no repeatable crash bugs.
- It will not necessarily be particularly fast; stability takes priority over speed at this stage.
- It will attempt to enforce validity if a DTD is available, but won't do a particular good job of this.
In short, it will be stable and support all XML, but won't necessarily be suitable for the end-user yet.
0.9.0
This will be the start of an unstable development series (0.9.0, 0.9.1, etc) where we work towards the 1.0.0 goal. We will start this as soon as 0.8.0 is done.
1.0.0
This will be the first stable release aimed at end-users. We hope to be here "early in 2005". It ought to:
- Have the stability of 0.8.0
- It will run at an acceptable speed; able to edit small-to-medium sized documents (say, up to 30 pages) at a decent speed on a moderately-powerful desktop machine (say, 550Mhz).
- "Understand" all of DocBook XML 4.1.2, and possibly later versions if there is enough demand for this.
- Table support
In short, it will be a comfortable application that can be recommended to end-users for editing XML documents.
Beyond 1.0.0
Some features can be deferred to after this release; we'll add them if we can without destablising things, but they're not yet a priority:
- Spellchecking and grammar checking
- Printing
- Support for Content Management Systems
Helping Out
If you want to help, see this page.
Older Releases
- The 0.7.* series started when the third implementation of the editor widget took over from the second.
- The 0.5.* series involved the second implementation of the editor widget.
- There wasn't really a 0.3.* series, the version numbers got confused so we went straight to 0.5 (I believe)
- The original Conglomerate prototype had version numbers of 0.1.1 and 0.1.2
Test Cases
Some useful test cases
- There are some files distributed in the examples directory of Conglomerate that make good tests (simple)
- The Gnumeric manual (large, complex, freely available DocBook document)
- The XML source of the O'Reilly book "DocBook - The Definitive Guide" (extremely large and complex DocBook document)
