Release plan 2020-2021 (draft)

[PMeira]

Since 2020 is a weird year, the plan is mainly to address a lot of the trivial issues in https://github.com/nilmtk/nilmtk/milestone/7 and release v0.5.0 after a full retest since there will be breaking changes from the dependencies, although no major changes on the NILMTK side.

• v0.5.0: basic maintenance and general bugfixes. Targeting late September to late October (2020) Jan/Feb 2021. This will explicitly deprecate the code under nilmtk.legacy. Some issues listed in https://github.com/nilmtk/nilmtk/milestone/7 will probably be moved forward to v0.6 due to time constraints.
• v0.6.x series: after v0.5.0, try to release a new version every month, worst case every three months. Ideally this would keep the dependencies up-to-date. Rough plan:
  • Complement the experimentation API (see API: method registration #886)
  • Drop nilmtk.legacy, add new datasets, address other NILM methods which cannot be easilly.
  • Updated examples.
  • Updated site and documentation. The old ones actually doing us harm.
  • Evaluate modern solutions for the datasets
  • Namespace packages?

Everything should be reevaluated by January/2021 for a more concrete plan of future versions.

[Rithwikksvr]

@PMeira , I think we also need to add a couple of examples for using the algorithms with the experimentation API and without the experimentation API.

The experimentation API sometimes restricts the users. By showing how to use the algorithms without the API might be useful as well. We need to do this in NILMTK-Contrib as well.

What do you think?