Almost ready

Two weeks ago Bruno initiated the next round of clean up. He went through the massive task of reviewing each and every pending bug, cleaning out many outdated or duplicate reports. He brought the list down to 82 bug reports.

There are feelings in the wider community that the current hugin is ready for a release, so what do we need?

A small informal discussion unfolded off-list amongst developers, debuggers and builders. The consensus is that we need to stay focused on the bug tracker, group the bugs into manageable clusters and address them in a relatively fast series of incremental releases.

Bruno assigned to the 0.7.0 category those bugs that need to be fixed now for the release, leaving the rest for later. His approach, supported by everybody, is that we should prioritize for the upcoming release those bugs that lead to crashes, and then those that lead to many support requests.

Gerry started working through the bugs. His practical approach already yielded a few quick fixes, and he is introducing sanity checks to prevent some of the reported crashes. Pablo has been busy making the control point list more responsive and ensuring the code base builds with different versions of wxWidgets on the many supported platforms.

Harry refined his documentation of the OSX builds and Michael Galloway reproduced the build.

On the Windows side I have been slacking with the builds but Guido and Tom have been relentlessly releasing binaries to testers.

I have submitted a patch with two simple improvements to enfuse / enblend. The patch has not made it yet into SVN. I may include it in my next installer. The two improvements affect details of the pyramid blending – specifically the resolution of the last step of the pyramid and the number of levels used in the pyramid blending, both requested by Erik Krause.

Somewhat, the moving target has become too comfortable. From my perspective hugin works well enough. The installers I have been publishing here in the past three months met the quality requirements for a release, especially when compared with what I see released from other open source projects and even from commercial entities. But there is no question: we need to get an official release out soon.