journal is hard + sugar and the digital age

[Greg Smith]

Hi Carol,

Re your comment:
 > In response to Scott's mail, if you look at the roadmaps linked to 
there is nothing approaching a feature oriented roadmap there, though a 
lot of good input is gathered in the mails captured at the end of his 
w.l.o/9.1 link, and of course there is no clue in this page as to which 
if any of these suggestions will be implemented and when.  That is the 
problem.  Here's what I mean by a feature roadmap.  Pick a set of key 
improvements.  Say when you are going to do them in words that can be 
understood by an outsider.  (Not, for example, "glucose  6.7.8.9 <with a 
git pointer>" ).   Asking for this roadmap is not about criticizing that 
the development is going too slow.

**********
I agree that we need better future directions communication. I think 
Eben recently said he will try to clean that up from the Sugar UI side.

On the XO software in general, right now we do not have a firm enough 
plan beyond 8.2 to create a roadmap like you describe. Its on my to do 
list to clean up the 9.1 page but it will be a while before we can 
choose the set of features and approximate order or time frame for them.

That said, 8.2 is not quite released yet (will be generally available 
and and manufactured next week) so for a few more days, the current 
roadmap is: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.0

Let me know if that is written in the user accessible language you want 
to see.

As soon as we have a plan for after 8.2, I'm all in favor of writing a 
feature level roadmap. Its a high priority but we have to get over this 
big hurdle first: "Pick a set of key improvements".

BTW the starting point for seeing the future plans is here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Future_releases

Hopefully that gives you an idea of the status of forthcoming releases 
and links to the past releases.

Let me know if that does not address your concerns.

Thanks,

Greg S