More mercurial in my life

As Robin announced, “Mercurial Working! *sort of*” for Flock development (wiki).

Summary of this post:

• Flock development migrating to Mercurial SCM.
• Currently, Flock continuous builds are not being made.
• The Flock team have re-grouped and we are moving forward with renewed energy!
• The next release targetted for early adopters is scheduled for mid-January.

The Mercurial he is referring to is not my former employer Mercurial Communications, nor do they have anything to do with the mecurial he is referring to.

Robin is referring to Mercurial “a fast, lightweight Source Control Management (SCM) system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects” (ref) which now holds the source code for Flock.

What does this mean. Since the beginning of last week, Flock continuous builds for development testing are currently not being done, and the timing of this left the build on MacOS particularly broken. We are getting close to having Flock working well again.

I will discuss more in a future post, why we went with Mercurial SCM, and my interest in SCM. Although the process has been long and involved, I have futher apprciation of Robin and the rest of the team’s skills particularly communicating and analytical abilities, and great confidence  in this decision.

This distributed SCM will also help us not have build breaks nor loss of core functionality like we have seen over the last three weeks where at least one core feature has been broken for each of the weeks.

At the same time, we had an excellent session led by Bart looking at where we are as a company and how to get the browser to a quality that is good enough for us to use for all of our own tasks, and for early adopters. Our values, processes, and Flock jobs were discussed, a plan created, and an awesome dialog continues.

Our current roadmap with a early adopter beta mid-December would not allow us to accomplish those goals, nor will it enable us to nurture the user and developer community.

Termie, Anthony, and the rest of the team are working on revising the roadmap and specification. This will likely result in a early adopters beta mid-January.

This team is tireless, and much of the American Thanksgiving holiday was spent working on the migration to Mercurial (Robin and Manish), and the roadmap and spec.

Chris, Daryl, and Gandalf all continue to work on our community infrustracture including dealing with the beast known as Bugzilla. Don’t let the Bugzilla logo fool you, Bugzilla is a beast!

technorati tags: mercurial, scm, flock, flock.com, release, browser, factoryjoe, termie, roadmap, schedule, bugzilla, bugtracking, issuetracking