News from the development front line

Last month was very busy and we want to update you on the progress.

General

Currently we are working towards first official “testing” release. It’ll be released when we’re confident enough about the quality - this includes not only the technical quality, but also usability and user experience. We want to be ready in February. However, there are many changes in almost every part of Straw, so the effort put into development and testing is considerable.

Our main target at this point is to have a solid foundation that we can build on in the future. We believe that the foundation of a software project must be carefully developed to provide enough flexibility to handle new functionality and user requests once the project milestone is released.

The “future” branch

All development is currently happening on the “future” branch in our Git repository. If you want to see how things are going, you can use a snapshot link next to the latest commit to get the latest source tree snapshot.

Note that at this point it is not recommended to install snapshots, but rather run Straw from the source tree. It’s quite simple:

First, unpack the snapshot tarball to some directory, and run the following command from that directory:

scripts/straw-local

Please note that things change quite often on “future” branch, it’s probably not a good idea to use it as your primary news reader at this point (although I must admit I already do ;-). Also, not every part of the UI works as it should and there is always some amount of bugs - that’s normal in development, but be prepared.

Feedback

We’ve already started cleaning up our GNOME Live wiki, Bugzilla and we have several ideas on how to improve our website - all that in preparation for 0.28 release!

Stay tuned for next updates.