Release crunch...
It's definitely not the first time I've been in release crunch mode. When you're nearing your copper jubilee as a software developer you'll have gone through that particular subdivision of hell a few times. About a dozen times, at least. I remember vividly my first experience of release crunch -- that project started in release crunch mode.
It was with *** *** ******, a Dutch software company that made taxation software for Dutch local government. With a legislation-ridden country like ours, that's a pretty good racket: you need new versions of large and complex applications yearly. Anyway, we were going to do the complete rewrite dance of ** 1.0 -- Amsterdam had decided it wanted new software and we were going to do it, and Joel Rosenberg was unheard off. About five hundred Oracle tables, a thousand Oracle forms and tens of thousands of lines of PL-SQL code. It was my first job, but I already told you that.
Monday morning, the kick-off meeting. Are you all signed up? Rah, rah? Rah! All signed up! Good -- we're going to do this using that fancy new methodology: Rapid Application Development. RAPID! That means we're going to work fast! Rah! Rah! All signed up? All signed up! We're going to use Oracle Designer for this -- got a special beta version especially built for us! And our beta release is in six weeks, with the full release three months for now. We'll do the training in those new tools after work, every Tuesday night! Right, team! Go for it! We know you can do it! The first one who I catch going home before 10:00 PM won't get his yearly bonus.
At that moment, there was one team member with more than three years of experience as a developer and he quickly wangled a transfer to another unit... Three years later the software was nearing completion but *** was broke and sold by its owner in a package deal together with another company of his. We discovered that the buyer would have paid more for the other company if he hadn't had to take our company, and I quit, in search of greener pastures. That was a learning experience...
And now we're in release crunch mode for Krita... There's still a lot to be finished, or even implemented, and the deadline is April 11. We're making lots of fast progress now, but the thoughtful piece on time in Liturgy and in Rogier van der Weyden's Lamentation at the Cross will have to wait. And I caught myself checking in broken stuff into cvs. Time for a refreshing glass of mint lemonade and a good book... What doesn't get finished won't get finished...
Look people, if you're expecting effect layers, channels, masks or paths, you won't get it. You also won't get cmyk, and no wet & sticky. Whether histograms will make it is uncertain (the gui is already done, so there are no new strings, and fixing the functionality could be seen as bug fixing, which can be done after beta...). There will be other brokenness and certain inexcusable lacunae. For instance, I've only written the introduction for the manual, no more.
By the way, and I've just checked in a fix for the selection brush/eraser, so I'm allowed to be discursive, I've tried to do the Photoshop tour from the Photoshop 5.0 manual. Neither the Gimp, nor Krita can do the tour as written. I wasn't surprised about Krita, but that the Gimp couldn't do it... I couldn't drag selections between windows, and I couldn't get the rotate to work on a selection.