Now that we've had a few weeks to get used to 4.1, it's time to start
looking at the road to 4.2.  Implicit in each release are on-going
bug-fixes, compilation cleanup, and security fixes; I think it's time to
start taking a serious look at the GNATS bug database.

I'm going to continue to lobby to get it running on the GNU server
instead of my slow sparc.

Today is the 28th of March, 2005.  Let's target the release of 4.2 for
October 1, 2005 or sooner.  Some of the items listed here already have
code written for them.  The PAM patch, for example, and Mel's mail-based
commands and database abstraction work.  As you can see, we have
tentative targets for incorporating them into GNATS.  These can be moved
around as we start making commits to the repository.  For example, I'm
willing to move the PAM patches to 4.2, although it has been noted that
GNUTLS should probably be in place first.

We could probably take another look at gnulib to provide things like
getdate.y or portability functions we don't want to explicitly maintain.
Obviously, automake/autoconf cleanups top the list of relatively simple,
yet needed things.

Currently, this is what the TODO list looks like::

    GNATS General TODO List
  2.Release 4.2: New Features
      1.Cleanup build infrastructure w/automake and autoconf
      2.Mail handling enhancements
          1.Mail-based manipulation of GNATS database (Mel)
          2.Trigger-based mail format replies (Mel)
          3.Add "To:" header parsing for PR# (prnumber@host.domain.tld) in queue-pr
  3.Release 5.0: New Features, Major Changes to DB Layer, RDBMS
      1.Database Enhancements
          1.DB Abstraction Layer (Mel)
            (Finished but not rolled into GNATS CVS 5.0 branch)
          2.Oracle RDBMS Backend (Mel)
            (Finished but not rolled in to GNATS CVS 5.0 branch)
          3.PostgreSQL RDBMS Backend (Mel)
      2.Account enhancements
          1.PAM Authentication (Pankaj)
            (Patch submitted 2004-06-20.)
  4.Release 5.x: New Features
      1.Security Enhancements
          1.TLS integration via gnutls
      2.Mail handling enhancements
          1.MIME Handling
              1.Detach files appropriately for GNATS DB format
              2.Convert HTML to TXT?
      3.Database Enhancements
          1.mbox Backend
              1.Maintain mbox archive of all emails
              2.Fake Audit trail entries as emails and append to mbox archive
              3.Continue to use existing PR datafile for logging events, keywords, and
                metadata

-- 
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net>           http://www.wookimus.net/
           assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */