[Kmymoney-devel] Some planning for the next release

[Alvaro Soliverez]

Hello all,
while we try to iron out the remaining bugs, I'd like to start talking
about some of the activities for the next release.

I think we are in a pretty good shape, though we have room for
improvement here and there, but I don't think we are doing a bad job
when it comes to mimic the features present in the KDE3 release.
That's why I'd like to start preparing the code for KDE4 greatness. A
full port to MVC widgets is part of that, but that will be done over
time. Cristian has an idea about how to handle models, which could
improve performance and improve the tidiness of the code. He can tell
you more about that, since part of that might be done during the next
release.
I want to focus my work on making it easier to integrate with other
apps. As part of that, some code has to be taken out of kmymoney.cpp
and into some deeper class.
There are several reasons for this:
- The logic has to be split from the GUI elements. When trying to
write an engine for Akonadi, this has proven to be a problem.
- Kmymoney.cpp is upwards from 6000+ LOC and growing, way beyond what
is manageable.
- The code for loading and saving the file is in there. As it is
attached to GUI code, it can't be unit tested, which has been a major
pain in the past and will be again in the future, for sure.
- Other applications can't easily use kmymoney libs unless they
rewrite the loading/saving code

If this is done, at least for the major methods, it should be done
during the next release or wait until after stable release, because it
has to be well tested.

Another one is of motivation. I do not want to spend the next 4 months
porting Q3TextEdit to KTextEdit widgets. It would feel good to know we
are preparing KMM to make the best of KDE4, and the other way around
through integration with dataengines, Akonadi, etc.

We also have to review the documentation and update at least the
version numbers for it.

Are there any other major undertakings you see for the next release?
It will be a quick cycle, like this one. Start on Feb 15th and end on
March 31st, with a string-freeze from March 16th onwards.
If things go ok, the next release will be a Release Candidate. Keep
your fingers crossed! :)

Regards,
Alvaro