Parrot Developer Summit summary

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 01:16:41PM -0800, Allison Randal wrote:
> 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

I would like to clarify this a bit based on what I recall of the
summit discussions:

- The list of features for any given major release are what we consider
  to be critical for the success of that release, not just what we
  think we'll have accomplished by then.

- Just because a feature is listed for a given major release doesn't
  mean that it won't be available before (possibly long before) that
  time.  In other words, the list is "feature X really needs to be 
  finished by this point" more than "don't expect XYZ to be
  available before then."  So, if someone feels strongly enough to
  start working on a feature long before its target completion date,
  there is absolutely no problem with that.

I think it's important to keep these clarifications in mind -- perhaps
I'll modify the wiki to include the above (unless there is disagreement).

I totally agree with Allison and others that the summit was
incredibly successful and productive -- I greatly enjoyed myself
and I'm looking forward to the next exciting phases of Parrot
development.

Pm