Welcome to Announcements: how Scope is planned, shipped and steered

[matheuswhite]

Hi everyone 👋

Scope has grown past the point where the roadmap fits in my head, so I'm opening
this category as the single place where the project's direction and
process are written down. If something changes about how Scope is planned,
released or maintained, you'll read it here first — no need to dig through
issues to reconstruct it.

What gets posted here

• Releases — what shipped, and what the next milestone is aimed at.
• Process changes — how features get picked, how releases are cut, how
  contributions are reviewed.
• Deprecations and breaking changes — announced before the release that
  ships them.
• Calls for feedback and testing — especially for things I can't test on
  every platform or probe.

Only maintainers post here, so the category stays low-traffic: watching it won't
flood your inbox. Comments are open on every post — that's where the discussion
is supposed to happen.

If you want just this, use Watch → Custom → Discussions on the repo.

Where everything else lives

• [Ideas] — the place to debate a feature or use case: when you're not
  sure yet what the right shape is, or you want to know if others hit the same
  problem. Discussing here first often turns a vague wish into a request I can
  actually act on. It's not a required step, though — if your request is already
  clear, open a feature request issue directly.
• [Q&A] — "how do I…", setup problems, plugin questions. Worth searching
  and asking here before opening an issue: a lot of what looks like a bug
  turns out to be a config or platform question, and the answer stays where the
  next person will find it. If it does turn out to be a bug, we'll move it to an
  issue.
• [Show and tell] — plugins you wrote, workflows, screenshots.
• [Issues] — reproducible bugs, and concrete feature requests. See
  CONTRIBUTING.md.

First topic: a feature-request window for each release

Today feature requests arrive continuously and get pulled into whatever release
happens to be open when they land. That's bad for everyone: you can't tell when
it's worth speaking up, and I can't tell what a release is actually going to
contain until it's nearly done.

What I'd like to try, starting with v0.7.0:

1. The window opens right after a release ships.
2. It stays open for about a month. Anything proposed in that period —
   here, in Ideas, or as an issue — is considered for the next release.
3. When it closes, I post the selected scope here: the milestone, what made
   the cut, and a short reason for what didn't.
4. Nothing gets lost. A request that arrives after the window closes rolls
   into the next one. Critical bugs are exempt and never wait for a window —
   pillar III (user-centric development) still wins.

The window for v0.7.0 is open now and I'll close it on August 31, 2026.
Bring it to [Ideas] if you want to talk it through, or open a feature request
issue if it's already clear — either way it gets triaged into the milestone.

Where should Scope go next?

Beyond individual features, I want this category to be the place where we argue
about direction — in the open, before it's decided. Scope is guided by
five pillars
(intuitive usage, compactness and orthogonality, user-centric development,
multiplatform, extensible), and those pillars constrain how we build, not
what we build next.

Open questions I have no settled answer for:

• How far should the plugin API go? Plugins can already observe and inject
  traffic. Should they be able to own panes, add commands with completions,
  persist their own state?
• Does Scope belong beyond serial and RTT? TCP/telnet, CAN, SWO, adb —
  where's the line between "compact and orthogonal" and "swiss army knife"?
• Who is Scope's user in a year? The person debugging one board on their
  desk, or the person automating a bench of twenty?

If you have a picture of where Scope should be a year from now, write it up —
as a comment below or as its own [Ideas] post. I'd much rather have the
argument in public than decide it alone.

Thanks for being here — and for every bug report, plugin and patch so far.

— Matheus Tenório dos Santos