Roadmap

Thomas Aeby, March 7, 2005

The last few months we were asked increasingly often if Big Sister is still being developed and when some progress migt be reflected on this page or by a new release.

First of all, Big Sister is not dead (yet :-)). However, developers (which actually mainly means me) do not have too much time to spend on Big Sister and the time spend on it is not reflected via new releases, apparently. That's a pity, I know, and I understand that people start thinking "oh, no changes on the web page for ages, it must be dead".

The work that regularly finds its way into CVS is related to the (slowly advancing) rewrite of the whole frontend. Interested parties will find what has become mature enough for putting it into CVS under "bigswaf" in the CVS repository.

I'll try to outline what should happen throughout this year:

finally get an up-to-date Windows binary out (promised long ago, needs probably around 2-3 days effort - not calendar days)
get a "service release" out containing bug fixes, patches and new sensors - most of them contributed ...
finish the started developer documentation series
continue Big Sister main documentation (Joerg Fritsch)
get some new sensors written and release them
finally solve the "contributed sensors" issue - I want interested sensor developers to be able to directly share new sensors without interaction with me
and then ... somewhen end of 2005 or maybe first half of 2006 a new major release should be there.

There are intentionally no dates associated with the above roadmap, since I cannot possibly predict how much time I can spend on Big Sister.

So when will we actually see a new release? I'd expect one between end of March and end of April.