Well, as of now, there are really just 2 team members actively working on Bongos. Me and Ian (Izobalax), and if I were to take a guess as to why that is, it would be that no one knows exactly what to do yet. ;P So that's what this post is for. Since Bongos is not sponsored by some massive company with thousands of bearded hippies constantly chipping away at code through their 3" thick spectacles, and since we don't have the patience to spend a few weeks writing some insanely complex, structured, rigid plan and hire a QA team to micromanage our developers, we're going to have to ... "freeform" a bit.
So, enough cheap talk. A few people have been asking for a timetable, and while I can't guarantee it will be followed, and I'm definitely not going to enforce it, it's still a good idea to have one.
Timetable
Early January, 2010 - Commons needs to be in at least a usable state, with a well defined API, and at least some documentation. Since Bongos will mostly be using the Python flavor of Commons, and since Noccy refuses to touch anything remotely related to any other language except PHP
- I'll have to hit it with a passion this coming month. If you know any Python developers that may be willing to help, that would be a huge help.
Late January, 2010 - Rocket! This should be a piece of cake, as I already have a lot of code from an old project, miniature.webbing, that can be ported immediately to Rocket. For those of you reading who have no clue what Rocket will be, it's basicaly going to be a WSGI toolkit that the Bongos core will be based on.
Around this time, the GNOME team should be all assembled and have completed some UI concepts, a GTK theme, possibly some Emerald windecs (or Metacity), and have a timetable for when the GNOME flavor of Bongos will be completed.
Now I really want to emphasize that the majority of our focus should be on the KDE flavor, but the GNOME side should be working together with the KDE team - just as Bongos-KDE will be trying to closely use existing standards, protocols, and frameworks instead of reinventing the wheel (Akonadi, Nepomuk, ...), I want Bongos-GNOME to also do the same, and in the end, we should have a very solid interoperability layer, with minimal dependencies.
Februrary, 2010 - KDE 4.4 released! Now we have 6 more months to procrastinate. Yay! Err...just kidding. This is when all the fun stuff starts. We should begin development asap on the UI, and by now I should have picked up a few Qt books and should be ready to start hacking away at connecting the backend to a frontend.
Oh, and the backend should be in a prototype stage by now. Things should work. You should be able to plug in your Google/Facebook/whatever account and it should do what it says on the tin.
Around this time the GNOME developers should be far ahead of us since GTK is a lot easier to work with than Qt. Both Bongos-GNOME and Bongos-KDE should have public code repositories, and this should also help in gaining a few enthusiast hackers to help with the projects and with resolving any early quirks and bugs.
March 2010 - MAYBE, MAYBE a release. That is, if and only if we don't manage to blow up the moon, turn ourselves into mutant aardvarks, and begin attaching chicken wings to pork.
TODO's
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Ideas
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this time imma stand up and shout
imma do things my way, its my way, my way or the highway