Development plans (was: New release (v0.8.9rc5))

["Andrew D. Hwang" <ahwang@mathcs.holycross.edu>]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Jay Belanger wrote:

> Did I miss 0.8.9rc4?
>
Release candidates that don't change much (e.g., small bugfixes with no
new functionality) may not get announced on the list.

> It looks like you're gearing up for a 0.8.9 release.  Is this because
> 0.9 is still a ways off?
>
Yes. :)

What may happen is that code improvements in 0.9 will gradually get
back-ported to 0.8, and (conversely) some of the basic functionality in
0.8 (like plotting capability:) will get merged with 0.9 in nearly current
form, just to make 0.9 presentable.

Currently 0.8 and 0.9 occupy different namespaces (ePiX and ePiX3d,
respectively). One idea is to make the libraries installable in parallel
(e.g., by naming libepix.a -> libepix3d.a, etc. in 0.9), then to phase out
0.8 by porting functionality to 0.9. (Actually, I prefer the renaming
ePiX -> ePiX2d, ePiX3d -> ePiX, but this is mostly cosmetic...)

The main difficulty with 0.9 is the complexity of the necessary algorithms
to do proper 3-D rendering; because of PostScript layering, the order in
which picture elements are printed becomes important, to say nothing of
removing hidden objects. The most common hidden object technique, the
"Z-buffer", doesn't seem obviously useful for line figures.

Robin Blume-Kohout mentioned a couple of useful features -- log plotting
and the ability to embed subfigures -- that could be implemented with the
coordinate abstractions of 0.9; this is further incentive to push full 2-D
capability into 0.9, even if 3-D capability is essentially that of 0.8.
However, there's a lot of ugly code in 0.8 (as I discovered yesterday:) so
porting isn't going to be wholly straightforward...

Anyway, this is a lot of thinking-out-loud. The short of it is that 0.8
will continue to be developed and maintained for the next few months (at
least), and there's not even a tentative schedule for 0.9.

--Andy

Andrew D. Hwang			ahwang at mathcs dot holycross dot edu
Department of Math and CS	http://mathcs.holycross.edu/~ahwang
College of the Holy Cross	(508) 793-2458 (Office: 320 Swords)
Worcester, MA, 01610-2395	(508) 793-3530 (fax)