I wanted to write something about how Gaim's communication problems might be solved by Sean Egan's new blog (which, at the time of writing, only has one post), but then I remembered that I have not written anything about Gregarius lately. Since the last post written about features in the next version of Gregarius is from June, there is a parable about glass houses which comes to mind.
According to the automated roadmap on the Gregarius bugtracker, there are currently about 70 tickets that need to be resolved before version 0.6.0 can be released. Some of these tickets include patches that simply need to be reviewed and included. Other describe large features that will need a significant amount of code to be refactored or created in order to their implementation. As should not be surprising, the latter tickets concern me more than the former. The two tickets which concern me the most are #25 and #252.
Ticket #25 is support for multiple users in Gregarius, which would allow the program to become much more useful in the enterprise and other shared environments. As it stands, not as much work as I would like has been put into this area. A custom branch has been created, but there have no been any changes made in the past month. Unjustified as it may be, since I was the one who suggested creating a separate branch for multiple user support, I feel like the lack of development is largely my fault. Part of the problem, I think, is that ticket #25 describes an ridiculously large issue. I am thinking about separating into several smaller problems - either by creating several discrete tickets on the bug tracker or through a page on the Gregarius wiki.
Ticket #252 involves redesigning Gregarius' configuration interface. The ticket is a duplicate of #135, which I originally reported, so I sort of feel like I "own" the problem and that it is my responsibility. While the two tickets both talk about redesigning the configuration page, I would argue that Gregarius' entire administrative section - with only some exceptions - suffers from usability problems and should be rewritten. Even those parts which work fine (like the Plugins page) would benefit from more AJAX.
When these two features are complete, I would personally feel ready to put a date on the release of Gregarius 0.6.0. I have no idea how the rest of the Gregarius development team feels about this, but maybe they will write something in the comments.