# The Future of Stumpless
See below for details about upcoming releases of Stumpless. If you have feedback
or want to make a suggestion, please submit an issue on the project's
[Github page](https://github.com/goatshriek/stumpless-logger).


## 0.2.0
 * [CHANGE] **Avoid Thread Spawn for single target**:
   When logs are only going to be sent to one target, the overhead of spawning
   a new thread for the logging adds needless delay. This should be detected and
   the thread spawn avoided in this situation.
 * [CHANGE] **More forgiving param name/value parsing**:
   Currently structured data params provided via `--sd-param` must include
   double-quotes, the same was as `logger` does. However, this can be painful to
   do in some environments where this requires different escape sequences based
   on the shell in use. This will be changed to allow the double quotes to be
   left out in scenarios where this is unnecessary.


## What you'll find here and what you wont
Stumpless is under active development, and has a long list of new features and
improvements waiting to be implemented. Some of these are detailed in the issues
list on the project Github website, but this is certainly not a comprehensive
list of planned updates. Similarly, work that is in progress on new features is
tracked as a project on the Github repository, but future planned work does not
exist there either. Instead, the plans for future direction are kept here, in
the project roadmap.

Items are added to the roadmap once they have been identified, assessed for
level of effort, and prioritized based on community needs. Each item is assigned
to a semantic version, along with its change type, a description, and the
reasoning behind it. Where they exist, you will see references to issues on the
Github repository where you can go for more details on the origin of the
request. Once a version is in work, you will be able to find a corresponding
project on the Github repository with each roadmap item listed as a task. Once
all tasks are complete, the version will be released and the next started.

Once an item has been implemented it will be removed from the roadmap. If you
would like to see a history of changes on the existing codebase, check out the
ChangeLog (ChangeLog.md in the project root) to see what was included in each
version of the library. In most cases, roadmap items will be removed from this
document and placed there upon completion.

Note that the timelines associated with each change are vague at best. The
project team is not currently big enough to realistically make any promises, so
timing is often left out to prevent folks from feeling cheated if something
takes longer than expected.


## A Note about Github issues and projects
A fair question to ask is why the roadmap is not being managed within the issue
and project features of Github itself, since this is where the project is
currently hosted. Indeed, suggestions submitted by the community are tracked as
issues, and projects are already created for ongoing work. There are a few
reasons that a separate roadmap is maintained:
 * **Issues are used to exclusively track bugs and community requests.**
   This certainly isn't a hard and fast rule, and isn't followed by many other
   projects, but it is how Wrapture is managed. Keeping the issue count as a
   clear indicator of known problems and community requests lets the project
   maintainers (and anyone interested in looking at how well it is being
   maintained) immediately see how much outstanding work exists. Of course,
   the roadmap may have features requested by the community or enhancements made
   clear by bug reports, but it will also have a number of features and tweaks
   that have a lower priority.
 * **Project direction should come packaged with the product.**
   Again this isn't a commonly followed rule, but it is one that the project
   author follows. Anyone that obtains the source code of the project at a
   single point in time should be able to quickly see the current direction of
   the project. Maintaining the roadmap within the version control of the source
   itself facilitates this, the same way that licensing and copyright
   notifications are traditionally bundled with code. And if you don't care,
   you can always ignore them.