Roadmap

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Roadmap

After putting up arbitrary milestone dates and then missing them with unfortunate regularity, we have now adopted the motto of Computer Science Research Group at UC Berkeley (the creators of BSD Unix), namely, ``our software and documentation will be released when it is ready''. :)

Given the complexity of the tasks that we are attempting to solve and the paucity of developer time, this seems to be the only prudent philosophy to adopt.

Major software and documentation releases from this project will be announced on the low-volume indic-computing-announce mailing list. The indic-computing-cvs-logs mailing list carries notifications of all changes to our source base and is a great way to keep tabs on the projects progress.

Task List

The major activity in the project appears to be on the following fronts:

The Handbook and related documentation
System software development

These are taken up in detail below. A separate section covers the other sub-projects.

The complete list of our sub-projects can be found at our sub-projects page.

The Handbook and related documentation

Handbook

We will make the first release of our Handbook when we have in place at least the following:

Complete coverage of at least one Indian language. This is most likely to be Kannada since this language seems to have the most effective volunteer community behind it.
Coverage of the Unicode standard and standards related to the Indian language featured.
Tutorials on the basics of computer encodings and Indic rendering.
A short history of Indian language computing
Support for generation of high-quality PDF output from the Handbook's sources.

All the above content would need to be reviewed by at least one more competent authority in addition to the content's primary author.

In addition to the documentation, the following software tools have to be in place before a release can happen:

Indic-phrase support for our documentation toolchain.
PDF generation support for our documentation toolchain.

Our handbook projects page lists all the software development needed for the Handbook.

FAQ

We will make a downloadable release of our FAQ when it reaches a suitable size (say when it contains hex 100 questions and answers.

Technology Map

We will make a downloadable release of the information in our proposed Technology Map when it reaches a level where it contains significant content (say hex 100 reviews).

System software development

The libraries and utilities that we are creating fall into this category.

Translib

The Translib transliteration library attempts to provide a generic transliteration and glyph layout library for indian languages. This will be released when it meets the following criteria:

Support for four Indic scripts
Its API and code has passed formal inspection by 2 project members.
Its documentation (including example code) has passed formal inspection by 2 project members and has been deemed acceptable.
The appropriate bug tracking systems have been set up for this project on SourceForge
The project's test suite has been reviewed for completeness.
The project successfully passes its test suite.
and, of course, when its lead developer feels it is ready (see the CSRG quote above :) )

The Font Annotator tool is meant to speed up the creation of the font maps that Translib uses.

Python FreeType V2 bindings

This project is needed for a number of other tools, including the Font Annotator, and the Translation Manager among others. Its release will be done when it meets the following criteria.

Support for the Base FreeType2 API, and the Outline processing API
Its code has passed formal inspection by 2 project members.
Its documentation (including example code) has passed formal inspection by 2 project members from the Python and FreeType communities and has been deemed acceptable.
The appropriate bug tracking systems have been set up for this project on SourceForge
The project's test suite has been reviewed for completeness.
The project successfully passes its test suite.
and, of course, when its lead developer feels it is ready (see the CSRG quote above :) )

Other Sub-projects

Our other sub-projects are either not in the critical path of any of our immediate initiatives or do not have active volunteers behind them.

All other things being equal, we would probably take up these projects in the approximate order below:

The Bootable OS Image sub-project
X Input Methods for Indic input.
The Translation Manager, our documentation translation assistant.

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