# Release Retrospective | |
2019-12-09 7:18pm | |
This post talks a lot about a personal coding project and | |
may come accross as promoting a piece of software. I am | |
really conscious of the fact that people use gopher to get | |
away from people pushing products, marketing, tracking, etc. | |
(that is how I came to be here as well) and I hope that | |
this does not come accross that way. I posted about the | |
development on this phlog before so this felt like a good | |
place to do a little wrapup after this release. In any case | |
feel free to bail out now. | |
++ | |
For those readers that do not know: my "gopher client" | |
Bombadillo | |
had a major release recently. It reached a big milestone and | |
has largely moved beyond just being a gopher client. I | |
worked really hard on it; as did the other main contributor | |
to this release, asdf. I have, of course, worked on other | |
projects before and released the source code... but no | |
personal projects of this scope. | |
I thought I would take the time to write down a few things | |
I learned or reflect on a few aspects of the process. So | |
here goes: | |
## Documentation | |
Writing documentation takes what seems like forever, but is | |
really really worth it. Having a second (or third) person | |
to be able to go over those docs is a priceless. | |
I am not always great at putting my ideas into words. So the | |
process tended to be that I would write a first or second | |
draft and asdf would clean it up and make it more | |
approachable to a non-developer or to someone that was not | |
familiar with this particular application. Then I would | |
look at it again and we'd go back and forth for a bit. Any | |
time a new feature was added that needed documentation, we | |
would start the process over again. This was generally done | |
as a part of the pull request process. | |
Working this way we produced the following: | |
- A solid README with instructions for building Bombadillo | |
- A detailed man page that covers just about anything you | |
would need to know about Bombadillo | |
- A website with a devlog, quickstart, releases, and info | |
- A gopher hole that msotly mirrors the website | |
## Issues & Feature Freeze | |
Managing issues is constant. We used our git repo's issue | |
system for issues, but also for discussing and prioritizing | |
new features. This worked out really well. We even got the | |
occasional person outside the project joining in commenting | |
about preferences, requests, or ways to go (that is in add- | |
ition to people submitting issues/bugs). | |
We instituted a feature freeze after working through all of | |
the issues that had been tagged for the release. The only | |
thing that got done after the feature freeze was updates | |
to the documentation and the things necessary to the actual | |
process of releasing (merging, adding tags, etc). | |
Even with all of that, it was released for one day before | |
new bugs started cropping up. Those have been solved, but | |
are not in the precompiled binaries for the 2.0.0 release, | |
but can be gotten from the repo. | |
## Fun, Fun, Fun | |
I had such a great time working on this release. I use the | |
browser as my main daily driver for most content. I even | |
use it for web content that does not require forms or other | |
interaction. It feels good to want a tool that does a par- | |
ticular thing and to just make that tool. | |
I have gotten reports from users on a few systems that they | |
successfully got it built and have been using it, which is | |
really really awesome. I have also, as mentioned above, | |
gotten bug reports... which at first is a bummer, but turns | |
out to be really really awesome also: it means that people | |
are interested enough to report back and hope to see things | |
get even better. | |
The browser also got added to this really cool site/list of | |
vim-like applications | |
## Next Steps | |
In the nearterm I think my big goal is to get color codes | |
rendering in suer generated content. Right now, to prevent | |
breaking the display, all escape sequences are cut out of | |
user generated content on all protocols. I have some ideas | |
that should make it possible to have these render without | |
needing to do a huge rewrite of the tui/rendering-engine. | |
I also got a report that Bombadillo was failing when using | |
.onion links. This is something I would very much like to | |
remedy. I have not used tor myself and as a result do not | |
know much about how it works, nor why it is not working in | |
the current setup. So it is on my todo list to get this | |
figured out. Anonymity measures, like tor, definitely fall | |
in line with the mission of the browser and would be a | |
really great addition. | |
Thanks to everyone that has taken the time to try out | |
Bombadillo, installed it on their server, submitted issues, | |
or taken the time to contribute in other way. false | |