Hiya. I love Kiln, but I'd really like to know what you guys plan on doing so I have some idea what features I can expect. Can you tell me?
|
4
|
||||
|
|
3
|
I'm glad you asked! We generally don't like to discuss our roadmap--not because we try to be super-secretive, but rather because we don't like saying we'll totally ship something on such-and-such a date, only to realize that it's much harder than anticipated/the something is actually a really bad idea for an unforeseen reason/half the development team has gone to the Khan Academy, screwing up our release schedule. But in this case, I want to make an exception and tell you exactly what we're working on for the next four weeks. And that includes for you licensed customers, too. Kiln BFiles and TortoiseHgOne of the big features that we wanted to land in this release, but didn't quite have ready in time, was to have Kiln BFiles support integrated into TortoiseHg. This work is largely done, but wasn't sufficiently tested to make the cut for this release. The good news is that we like to be good citizens, so we're using the extra time to get the Kiln BFiles support into TortoiseHg proper. This means you won't need to install our custom Kiln Client to get Kiln BFiles support in your favorite graphical tool, and that TortoiseHg will therefore support Kiln BFiles even if you're running it on, say, Linux. TortoiseHg and Kiln Client for MacLikewise, we've been contributing a number of patches upstream to the TortoiseHg project to make it possible to build nice, standalone TortoiseHg clients for Mac with embedded Mercurial. No more "Mercurial broke on Lion!" stuff to worry about. No more "Why don't I have a beautiful TortoiseHg client for my Mac?" to worry about. You'll be able to use the same great client that we have for our Windows customers as a native OS X application. If you'd like, you can beta-test this work today. Just ask. As part of this effort, we'll be working on making a completely support Kiln Client for OS X in the very near future. No more custom installing extensions; you'll have the same, easy experience that your Windows teammates have. Groups supportWe hear you: some of you have big companies, and while Kiln's ACL system is awesome for tiny organizations and for overrides, the lack of real groups isn't working that well. So we're adding groups support to Kiln. Groups will be shared with FogBugz, so if you have a FogBugz group called We think this will be a tremendous improvement over the existing situation for our larger customers. But I'm a licensed customer! I have to wait four months for this?!You won't. In fact, you're really going to like this: we're going to ship this to you roughly alongside Kiln On Demand. There's a perception that we don't care about licensed customers, because they have to wait longer to get updates. That's simply not true. It's a simple matter of testing and deployment. When we want to deploy a new feature to Kiln On Demand, we have to make sure it works on exactly one set of hardware and software: the exact boxes we have in our data center. Those boxes run one version of Windows, one version of SQL Server, one version of Redis, one version of Memcache, one version of IIS, and so on. So if it works perfectly on those, but breaks horribly on pretty much anything else, that's fine. Further, if we need a new piece of software to make something happen (for example, the Python Imaging Library is used heavily for the new image diffs), then we can just install it on those boxes and, poof, all done. This is a completely different situation from what we have with licensed customers. Licensed customers run on Windows 2003, or 2008, or 2008 R2. They run IIS 6, or IIS 7. The run SQL Server 2005, or 2008, or 2008 R2, or 2005 Express, or 2008 Express, or 2008 Express R2. They may run the Kiln Storage Service on the same box, or they may not. They may run FogBugz alongside Kiln, or they may not. They may be using LDAP authentication, or they may not. And a thousand other little things we need to check. Don't think of it as we don't care about licensed. Think of it as we're taking advantage of how much easier it is to deploy to Kiln On Demand. That said, the above changes will ship to licensed customers within the next 4 to 6 weeks. We know that these changes--Kiln BFiles in TortoiseHg, Mac support, and Groups--are very important to everybody, and we want to make sure that all our customers can have them, so we're going to work hard to ship Kiln 2.6 just about a month after Kiln 2.5. So that's our short-term roadmap. We hope you like it. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask, and I'll be happy to answer. |
||
|
|
