I've been talking to Tim on the IRC channel and there is some desire to get things moving on the dev branch.
He's got pretty much all the fixes in stable merged into dev, so what I'd like to see is for us to commit to putting the dev branch onto the live main servers in about a week. I'm going to say November 23 sounds good... (Nov 22 is the SoCal Linux Expo so I'll be busy that day, but free the next.)
In the next week we should make sure that everything in the dev branch either _works_ and is ready for prime time, or is cleanly disabled pending further work. Once we put it on the main server it'll get more exposure and we'll find more bugs. :)
After a few more days of fixes we can branch it off as a new stable point release and swear never to touch it again except for emergency bug fixes. For real this time!
I'd like us to then commit to a fairly regular release schedule; perhaps every 3 or 4 weeks we make sure that anything in the dev branch is either cleanly working or can be cleanly taken out.
It'd also be great if we had more automated testing tools. Lee wrote this whole big Java-based client-side test suite that takes up a huge amount of space and, as far as I can tell, no one has ever used it or attempted to maintain it. Heck, I couldn't even figure out how to compile it... I don't know if it'd be worth someone trying to update that, or if we should just toss it and concentrate on unit tests in PHP that work with the actual code and test individual components in isolation.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)