I was hoping we’d have an initial attempt at M3 by now – we’re so close, honestly, but just not quite there yet. Annoying, even for me, but good things come to those who wait.

I’m acutely aware of one problem: our up-front decision with this project was to lay out a road to 1.0 that we thought was achievable, and basically just do it in milestone steps. Between M2 and M3, this hasn’t really worked out in the way I would have wanted. From the outside, I assume that it looks like the project has slowed down a bit.

From the inside, I know that isn’t the case, but that’s not really proof 🙂 So, pictures being worth a thousand words, I fired up my OpenOffice.org and fed it some data from subversion. It’s a bit big to put inline, but click here to see what I’m talking about. Basically, it shows how the svn revision has changed over time: the steeper the line, the greater the activity.

There are a couple of things we can take away from this:

  • It might seem quiet on the outside – but the reality is, we’re much more active!
  • It’s sometimes surprising how much change is actually happening.
  • Lots of activity means lots of changes, which do take time to settle.

In the background, M3 is turning into something very different from what we initially planned. We didn’t want to replace MDB, but ended up having to bite the bullet – I think we’re much better placed for it. We’re going to have working caldav support, pluggable authentication, much more flexible mail aliasing, and a host of other features.

I’m really looking forward to M3. I see this as the “last peak” almost: the road to 1.0 ought to be relatively downhill from here. We have a bit of a bump in terms of the plans for Dragonfly, but I don’t feel those are quite the same kind of core change that our project has been through, and I hope that we’re now going to be much more about filling out features, polishing, documenting and debugging, which is exactly what we need to be doing for 1.0.