Keeping track of ongoing development

[gcvr]

Is there a way to get an overview of ongoing development? Some of the issues raised in the forum may be quite easy to fix, but currently stand over until a new version is released. Also new features under development may need "user opinions". It would be nice if users can be more involved in ongoing developments. I don't know how this can be done, but maybe someone has a good idea ...? Gert.

[bf]

Hi Gert,

I agree to your point that interested users should be better integrated into the development process.

We could from time to time make some CADEMIA Pre-Release available to interested users. Obviously, such a Pre-Release cannot be free of bugs. Users trying a Pre-Release will accept this. However, I'm a little afraid of buggy CADEMIA-documents created by such a Pre-Release. We must find a way to deal with such documents. Or the store comand could be disabled?!

Best reagrds,
Bert.

[gcvr]

Hi Bert,

I understand your point about buggy documents, that would definitely cause all sorts of problems. However, the main idea is to involve users on the "development" side, not the "production" side. Consequently I don't regard it as a problem if the store command is disabled in pre-releases.

Best regards,

Gert.

[t.woelk]

I strongly request to not disable any store functions. This is contraproductive at the least. If buggy documents are a problem then this needs lots of testing. Your Users will feed the output of Cademia to all sort of applications. Some might try software combinations you have never thought of. I would rather suggest to have a good and easy to use feed back channel. Maybe moreso on a prerelease version as such users would be more willing to report problems. Maybe the output files of a prerelease version should also store as exact as possable information as to which version was the creator, maybe together with info on the java version and installed cademia plugins if present. I dont think that disabling things is a good thing to test the workability of an application.

tschüß
t.woelk

[bf]

Hi,

I appreciate your contributions very much and I think that you are right. So the deal would be to add the CADEMIA version to all the CADEMIA documents stored.

If then, however, a document stored by an alpha or beta release cannot be loaded by an official release then the user must look for mercy somewhere else?!

Do you agree to this? Or would you prefer to have shorter development cycles? Then the whole idea of pre-releases would not be necessary any more.

Best regards,

Bert.

[t.woelk]

Shorter development cycles? Are you kidding? The shorter the better. Even if the changes are few, someone might be just waiting for that new feature (like me waiting for dxf export). If you can handle the extra work - please release as often as possible. This will keep people interested - hey look the site is alive and kicking.

Maybe you can use the philosophy of stable and unstable branches. You could offer more than one version to save the file in, a stable or old and a unstable or test version. The test version would be the one with the extra information in the header or somewhere about who built it in what environment. Maybe you could ad a notes section to the file. If I have issues with a certain file one could add some descriptive info. (Like this file wont load into version soandso). The normal file version may not need this and could save the space.

I spent some time on the Trackdraw project at http://www.trackdraw.org and learned that new versions often broke things that had worked before (svg export seemed always to be critical). Yet a live forum and frequent releases seemed the best way to solve problems.

Addressing the start of this thread maybe a roadmap such as here http://dark-oberon.sourceforge.net/?page=roadmap might be usefull. It may give the interested user an idea of what is happening and were you plan to go when.

I know nothing of the legal base or the infrastructure behind this project but if is to become an open source comunity effort I would suggest you release more information on how others can contribute. This way you may have more to add in shorter releases. A suggestions section for plugins and some howto might be a start as well as letting others start some translating. Localization or i18n has proven vital to the spread of other projects. It does open more doors into local schoolrooms. I did write an html formular that used javascript to help translate and generate the proper xml files for the language based strings in Trackdraw. It showed that storing translatable strings in easily editable extern files was very usefull.

I had requested a loader or wrapper for the portableapps.com menu here http://portableapps.com/node/11172 maybe you could help with an in between version suited for portability or at least document where Cademia stores what information or even host a special portable usb key friendly version on your own site.

Maybe the plugins at http://www.litecad.com/ could be usefull?

Oh somewhat offtopic but have you read the entry about Cademia here? http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Liste_mechanischer_CAD-Programme#CADemia There's quite a lot of issues addressed there As it seems you might want to investigate the possabilities of skins for the GUI. A CAD-profi version like you already have, a grafic-design guy version with a maximum of mouse input, a schoolboy version with lots of icons and a gardeners version with a plant library... oh well halfway kidding... nevertheless skins are cool.

maybe next time I should split my posts...
und tschuess
t.woelk

[hsrai]

Don't you "feel cvs nightly build" may be good thing using sourceforge.org or sarovar.org os similar other such service.

--
H.S.Rai

[dimpflmoser]

Hello everybody,

I'd like to develop a gis-system based on cademia...

As the current version loads painfully slow (drawings are more than 50 MB) I'm higly interested to get a view on the upcoming release (which starts with only one screen by default?).
Another important point would be the possibility to load and display georeferenced raster images.

So I would appreciate somting like development-releases aswell.

Thanks Helmut

[Torsten]

Hello Helmut,

we are still developing version 1.5, which is in alpha state. We are going to release a beta version in September or October. Cademia 1.5 will feature a variable window view, a more flexible dimensioning, DXF export and other improvements.

Greetings, Torsten.

[t.woelk]

Could we at least have the DXF export by September? ... please ?

[t.woelk]

Not really september anymore ... but dxf and pdf export!! cool! now I just need some time to play with this - now where was this fully provisioned remote island?