Release Plan

[iandinwoodie]

I thought it might be worthwhile to start a discussion about a tentative release plan. Here are some points I think might be worth discussing:

1. The last release (0.7.0) was created over 3 years ago (April 2016). Do we have a list of changes that occurred in this time period so that we can provide a release note with the next release? If not, then I can start compiling this list.
2. Do we have a list of current features and bugs? I think the easiest way to allow for tracking of bugs and features is through the use of GitHub issues. The use of GitHub issues would greatly simplify the generation of release notes for future releases. I'm wondering if anyone else has an opinion on this.
3. While committing directly to the repository provides a quick-to-update workflow, it makes code review/oversight and tracking difficult. The use of branches and pull requests can be helpful for associating a collection of changes with the bug or feature they were intended to address. Again, I'm wondering if anyone else has any opinion on this.
4. Lastly, do we have any idea of when our next release will be and if it will be a major or minor version? If not, maybe we should have a discussion about our roadmap to the next release so that the community has something to look forward to and so that we have something to work towards.

[ethanmoffat]

Hey, sorry I missed this since I was on vacation.

1. I haven't been tracking changes beyond just committing to master. I mostly wanted to dump my changes from MSEOSERV in my personal account on top of this fork. The major changes are

• Add (optional) logging of packet data
• Add working NPC dialog
• Add support for SQL server database engine
• Update engineering system to be more robust / automated (including VS compilation)
  I don't know if any of this warrants a major/minor version increment, if we do "release" I'd call it 0.7.1. But I'm open to discussing this.

2. The bug tracker on eoserv.net is the authoritative source. I agree on use of GitHub issues. I would like to port over the bugs from eoserv.net, but there are a lot on there...

3. Agree on use of PRs. I think what we discussed via discord is that organization members could submit PRs to master directly from branches, while other users would need to fork and submit PRs that way.

4. I haven't considered "release" timing or what we want to include. I'd like to automate pipelines around this, so that PRs merged into master trigger a deploy of the software to different dev environments (maybe for different DB engines) so that we have multiple test beds. Then a "release" could involve deploying an "official" image to e.g. eoserv.moffat.io (my current test server).