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       # Release Retrospective
       2019-12-09 7:18pm
       
       This post talks a lot about a personal coding project and
       may come accross as promoting a piece of software. I am
       really conscious of the fact that people use gopher to get
       away from people pushing products, marketing, tracking, etc.
       (that is how I came to be here as well) and I hope that
       this does not come accross that way. I posted about the
       development on this phlog before so this felt like a good
       place to do a little wrapup after this release. In any case
       feel free to bail out now.
       
       ++
       
       For those readers that do not know: my "gopher client"
       
   DIR Bombadillo
       
       had a major release recently. It reached a big milestone and
       has largely moved beyond just being a gopher client. I
       worked really hard on it; as did the other main contributor
       to this release, asdf. I have, of course, worked on other
       projects before and released the source code... but no
       personal projects of this scope.
       
       I thought I would take the time to write down a few things
       I learned or reflect on a few aspects of the process. So
       here goes:
       
       
       ## Documentation
       Writing documentation takes what seems like forever, but is
       really really worth it. Having a second (or third) person
       to be able to go over those docs is a priceless. 
       
       I am not always great at putting my ideas into words. So the
       process tended to be that I would write a first or second
       draft and asdf would clean it up and make it more 
       approachable to a non-developer or to someone that was not
       familiar with this particular application. Then I would
       look at it again and we'd go back and forth for a bit. Any
       time a new feature was added that needed documentation, we
       would start the process over again. This was generally done
       as a part of the pull request process.
       
       Working this way we produced the following:
       
  HTML - A solid README with instructions for building Bombadillo
       - A detailed man page that covers just about anything you
         would need to know about Bombadillo
  HTML - A website with a devlog, quickstart, releases, and info
   DIR - A gopher hole that msotly mirrors the website
       
       ## Issues & Feature Freeze
       Managing issues is constant. We used our git repo's issue
       system for issues, but also for discussing and prioritizing
       new features. This worked out really well. We even got the
       occasional person outside the project joining in commenting
       about preferences, requests, or ways to go (that is in add-
       ition to people submitting issues/bugs).
       
       We instituted a feature freeze after working through all of
       the issues that had been tagged for the release. The only
       thing that got done after the feature freeze was updates
       to the documentation and the things necessary to the actual
       process of releasing (merging, adding tags, etc).
       
       Even with all of that, it was released for one day before
       new bugs started cropping up. Those have been solved, but
       are not in the precompiled binaries for the 2.0.0 release,
       but can be gotten from the repo.
       
       ## Fun, Fun, Fun
       I had such a great time working on this release. I use the
       browser as my main daily driver for most content. I even
       use it for web content that does not require forms or other
       interaction. It feels good to want a tool that does a par-
       ticular thing and to just make that tool.
       
       I have gotten reports from users on a few systems that they
       successfully got it built and have been using it, which is
       really really awesome. I have also, as mentioned above,
       gotten bug reports... which at first is a bummer, but turns
       out to be really really awesome also: it means that people
       are interested enough to report back and hope to see things
       get even better.
       
       The browser also got added to this really cool site/list of
  HTML vim-like applications
       
       ## Next Steps
       In the nearterm I think my big goal is to get color codes
       rendering in suer generated content. Right now, to prevent
       breaking the display, all escape sequences are cut out of
       user generated content on all protocols. I have some ideas
       that should make it possible to have these render without
       needing to do a huge rewrite of the tui/rendering-engine.
       
       I also got a report that Bombadillo was failing when using
       .onion links. This is something I would very much like to
       remedy. I have not used tor myself and as a result do not
       know much about how it works, nor why it is not working in
       the current setup. So it is on my todo list to get this 
       figured out. Anonymity measures, like tor, definitely fall
       in line with the mission of the browser and would be a
       really great addition.
       
       
       
       Thanks to everyone that has taken the time to try out
       Bombadillo, installed it on their server, submitted issues,
zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70 /~sloum/phlog/20191209-19.txt:113: invalid line / field count