Parrot Developer Summit summary

[Allison Randal]

The first Parrot Developer Summit was a fantastic success! Thanks to all 
who joined us, it was great to meet you face-to-face (some for the first 
time).

For those who couldn't join, here's a quick summary of the discussion. 
Saturday we discussed the release plan for the next few years. Sunday we 
continued working on the release plan, answered design and 
implementation questions, and broke into smaller groups for developer or 
foundation discussions.

The release plan is to continue the monthly release schedule, but twice 
a year have a time-based release attached to a major version number. We 
listed the most important features for Parrot, and sorted them by 
logical progression (what depends on what), by target audience (who we 
expect to be the primary users at particular stage of the adoption 
cycle), and what we can reasonably expect to complete in a given 
time-period. You can see the details of our feature sorting on the wiki 
page:

   https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/wiki/ParrotRoadmap

Because these are time-based releases, they have fixed dates within our 
ongoing monthly release cycle. Here's the list of time-based releases, 
and the focus of each one. (We may change the "X.5" version numbers for 
the "half-year" release.)

- March 2009, 1.0, stable API for language developers

- July 2009, 1.5, integration

- January 2010, 2.0, production use

- July 2010, 2.5, portability

- January 2011, 3.0, independence

- July 2011, 3.5, green fields

If you don't see a particular wishlist feature on the roadmap, it 
doesn't mean we won't be doing it, it only means it's not on the 
critical path for the time-based releases.

It's exciting to be able to tell people with certainty that the 1.0 
release of Parrot will be in March 2009, and to see from the roadmap 
that we can deliver. I'm pleased and proud to have worked with all of 
you to reach this point, and greatly look forward to the next few years.

Allison