Time to plan for 1.0

[Eric S. Raymond]

Summary:

* We need to start working towards a 1.0 release no later than 28 September.

* I need our senior devs to identify any release-blocker issues
  and tell me what they think our pre-release priorities should be.

Details:

On Saturday, I had a phone conversation with Mark Atwood during which
he apologized to me and the team for being pretty absent recently.  I
assured him that we all get it about a adjusting to a senior position
at Amazon being enough to eat anyone's bandwidth.

Then yesterday (Sunday), at an ICEI planning meeting, Susan Sons
revealed a hard deadline for an NTPsec 1.0 release.  For fundraising
purposes she needs it to be out by the O'Reilly infosec conference on
28 October.

If I had believed that Mark was going to be back on stream in the near
future I would have left it to him to respond.  As it is, and
considering my evaluation of the state of the project, I assured Susan
that Oct 28 was doable and committed us to it.

Since Mark and I were previously discussing an end-of-summer release
date, I doubt he will object. If and when Mark becomes available I
will cheerfully defer to his judgment about state of readiness and
release timing, if we have not already shipped.  In the mean time,
I'll step up.

This might have been a tougher call, but since early summer we've
basically been polishing (Ian's AgentX work will be a nice-to-have but
I do not regard it as essential for a 1.0 release).  I experimentally
faded out of view for a couple of weeks to find out if the project
would stall or hit serious difficulty without my hand on things.  It
didn't.  I found that reassuring.

Accordingly, I told Susan that if she needed us to ship a week from
*now*, it would be a bit hair-raising but doable. I've seen nothing on
the issue list that I think is a blocker.  But I need our devs to tell
me if I'm missing anything, and what set of priorities we should put
on pending work.

I'd like to aim for no later that 28 September.  That way we'll be
able to report not just first ship but a month of field experience.

If anyone thinks my assumptions are incorrect, speak up quickly,
please.  Otherwise let's ID what we need to get done and do it.  I
actually think we ought to be fully able to ship in three weeks
(that is, around 28 August); let's try for that.

Gary, Hal, Matt, Daniel: Would all of you check in on this, please?
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.
	-- Mohandas Gandhi