Roadmap

[Olly Betts]

To give you all an idea of where Survex is heading in the short to medium term,
I thought it would be useful to sketch out a roadmap.

There have now been 4 releases since 1.0.0.  There are likely to be a few more,
but increasingly these will be bug-fixes and very minor tweaks.  The more
major changes which may still go in are:

* Backsights and repeat readings (unless the changes required to fit it in are
  much greater than I anticipate).
  
* Improved PLT export so the files produced are actually capable of being read
  by Compass rather than only by Carto (someone else is looking at this, so it
  depends how they get on).

* Perhaps moving some of the aven options into a "Configuration" dialog.

* Hopefully release a MacOS X version.  This now builds successfully, but I
  know next to nothing about the expected structure of a MacOS X application,
  and packaging is harder than seems necessary.  If any budding MacOS X guru
  can lend a hand it would be appreciated.

* Look at building aven for MSDOS.

* Produce a CDROM distribution with all the versions on.

These versions will be 1.0.N.

Fairly soon (probably in parallel to the above), we'll start work on the next
major version.

We've decided to adopt the convention that 1.<even number>.<number> is a stable
release and 1.<odd number>.<number> a development version - it's used by a
number of other projects and seems to work well.

So 1.1.0, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, ... will be development versions with more major
changes and consequently increased risk of instability and bugs.  You're
welcome to download and try out these versions, but it would be prudent to
stick with stable releases (1.0.<number>) for important work.  I intend to
arrange things so it's easy to install a stable and a development release
on the same computer.

Once all the planned features are in and the 1.1.N versions have stabilised,
1.2.0 will be released.  Bug fixes and small enhancements will be 1.2.1, 1.2.2,
etc.  Then the new development versions will be 1.3.N, leading to 1.4.0 (or
perhaps 2.0.0).  And so on.

Here's a tentative list for what I'd like to get in for 1.2.0:

* Integrate the OpenGL code into aven - this allows plotting of terrain,
  smoothed lines for survey legs, etc.  If you saw the CUCC Austria talk
  I gave last year at the BCRA conference, you've seen this in action.

* Passage dimensions (LRUD), and drawing of "solid" cave models using it.
  I'm going to write a separate mail about this.

* LRUD requires a minor revision of the 3d format, so while it's changing
  I'll add slots for survey title/date/team/etc which you can currently
  specify in the .svx files but are pretty much ignored.

* Printing from aven (probably using the wxWindows printing facilities) with
  page preview so user can adjust where page breaks occur relative to the
  survey and select which pages to print (Toporobot does this very well).

* Export as DXF/Sketch/PNG/for hand plotting/etc hooked into aven.

* Finish off and enable presentation code in aven (again, this was in
  use for my talk at the BCRA conference).

* Colouring by date/error/survey/etc rather than just depth in aven.

* "Scriptable UI" - more on this in a separate mail soon.

It's not definite that all those will make it in - if one or two are taking a
lot longer than the others, I'd rather hold them over and release 1.2 sooner.
And there are probably a few things not on that list.

Cheers,
Olly