On 2013-10-01 23:21+0100 Andrew Ross wrote:

> On Monday 30 Sep 2013 23:40:25 Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> I still need to create a news item and do other publicity, and I also
>> need to refine my notes on this release process in
>> README.Release_Manager_Cookbook. But otherwise, the 5.9.10 release
>> process is completed and the commit freeze is lifted.
>>
>> Let the 5.9.11 release cycle begin!
>>
>
> Alan,
>
> Thank you (as ever) for all your work and rigorous testing of the release.

You are welcome.  And thank you for all your contributions to
this release cycle.

> Let's hope we can make them a little more regular again.

I agree.  For a while there I was beginning to wonder if I would ever
be able to finish this release as I kept running into one issue after
another due to bit rot having set in during the two years of changes
since our last release and due to troubles due to the change of
release manager such as the file permissions issue at SourceForge.
Nevertheless, I am certainly game to be the release manager for at
least one more release since it should be a lot easier for a short
release cycle (==> less bit rot) and because I took care to document
my newly gained experience in README.Release_Manager_Cookbook which I
can refer to next time.  And I would also like to take this
opportunity to thank Hazen one more time for all the PLplot releases
he managed over the years; I now have a much better appreciation of
how much work he went through on our behalf. :-)

One of my limited goals for this release cycle is to disable the old
SGML/DSSL Docbook documentation generation methods completely and move
to the UTF-8 xmlto and dblatex --backend=xetex methods I discussed
before for our DocBook documentation generation.  I am already pretty
close to being done with this project. I have already introduced some
"interesting" UTF-8 strings into the DocBook source (not committed
yet), and the resulting info and html results already look good with
no build-system changes at all (except for a onsgmls fix I committed
earlier today so that the validate target still works despite these
UTF-8 strings in our DocBook source). And my previous experience shows
that dblatex --backend=xetex (not available indirectly via xmlto)
should work to produce good pdf results for the case where arbitrary
UTF-8 strings are in the DocBook source.  So with luck I will be able
to finish off this project by tomorrow.

A more open-ended goal for me for this release cycle is also to
push ahead with build_projects to the point where it is easy
to use by others.

I also have heard off-list from Hez that some unexpected real-life
issues kept him from finishing off the the plcolorbar propagation
issues for OCaml for 5.9.10, but he fully intends to finish off that
work for this release cycle.  And I am hoping that Arjen continues his
extraordinarily useful testing of PLplot on various Windows platforms
(including testing build_projects on all Windows platforms accessible
to him once that project is more mature). Anyhow, my feeling is all
these goals are reasonably straightforward so there is a good chance
we can release 5.9.11 just a few months from now.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________

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