What is going on with FreeGuide?

June 04, 2005 [FreeGuide, Tech]

I thought I'd write a little bit about FreeGuide, since I'm planning to link this page off the FreeGuide page.

I'm the lead developer on FreeGuide, and having just started a new job (which so far is excellent) my free time is seriously limited, especially as my commute is 1.5 hours at the moment. I expect as I settle in I'll find more time, and I also hope my commute may reduce in a few months. In the meantime I've had to fall back into maintenance mode, but fortunately there are several contributors stepping up to add long-requested features. The most prolific contributor has been Alex, who has been working on a number of excellent new features in our development branch. That branch started when Risto refactored the code into an MVC style and optimised the display to speed up massively operation with more than about 10 channels.

That branch has been around _far_ too long, as it's a maintenance headache to look after 2 quite different branches, and it causes confusion when people send in patches against old code.

I really want to make the development branch reasonably bug-free and then declare it stable and retire the 0.8.x branch once and for all. I hope we can do that pretty soon.

Meanwhile, Alex is adding more features, the most notable of which is the plugins system. That will eventually allow you to download and install new listings grabbers without upgrading FreeGuide itself, and plug in loads of other things like exporters, recording schedulers, and loads more. Also excitingly soon to go in is the recording scheduler system developed by Reuel and integrated by Alex.

I want to make 0.10.x stable next release, then get those features in (probably under a 0.11.x name), stabilise them, go through the TODO and make a _short_ list of things to do before 1.0, do them and NOTHING else, and then finally release 1.0. It would be great if the plugin system turned out to be flexible enough to handle all the new thigns people suggest, but if not I plan to keep the 1.0.x branch stable long term, and allow further changes in a 1.1 branch.

The features I think are needed for 1.0 are:

Hopefully not a lot else...