Thoughts on 3.4 release

[Rik]

12/16/10

All,

I completely agree that a new release is past due.  I also agree with the
sentiments that FLTK is close, but not quite ready to become the default
plot engine.  One item that we still might want to consider is switching
over to Fotos' new logos and branding.  A major release seems like a good
point to bring them in.

As a first step, I would suggest entering feature freeze and putting a note
to that effect on the Savannah Bug Tracker.  Bug reporters should
understand that their issues are merely being postponed, not ignored.  If
we have any confidence we could actually post a date when we expect the 3.4
release to occur.

On a practical matter, we're running into Christmas and New Year's holidays
which may reduce the amount of time available for coding for some.

On a second practical note, what is the best way to maintain collaborative
TODO lists?  For example, I have a list of undocumented functions
(functions that have docstrings but are not yet included in the manual).  I
could post this list to the octave-maintainers group, I could file a bug
report with the list and have coders re-post the shortened list every time
a file is documented, we could temporarily create a Mercurial controlled
text file, or we could use some other strategy like a public Wiki.  Any
preference?

I will volunteer to run scripts to do the final spellcheck and grammarcheck
 once everything is in the .txi files.  I will also start posting as bugs
with elevated priority some of the documentation problems I've found so
that more people can help close these issues out.

Cheers,
Rik