I previously mentioned a rather soft deadline near the beginning of February for the forthcoming release.
This is an important notice for all active PLplot developers that I have just decided to replace that deadline by the firm deadline of Saturday, February 28th for the release which would only be subject to change if there are some showstopper bugs revealed just before the release that we are having trouble dealing with. The reason for that firmness is because it has already been much too long since our last release (in February last year). Most of that delay was justified because a lot of us needed to get used to git. However, because of that extra-long release cycle some important fixes and improvements have been kept from our users for much too long already, and therefore the plan is to address that issue on the above firm deadline. The previous deadline was quite soft because I wanted to give Arjen a good chance to get his really important work on improved Fortran bindings into this release. He has told me off list that he has almost finalized the design of those improvements over the Christmas break. If he finishes the design of those improvements in the next week or two then I hope to be able to help him finish off the project with some much-needed editing help (since extensive editing changes in the Fortran bindings will be required to implement his new design). So my potential help in that regard does give us a chance to finish the implementation and test it sufficiently on all platforms accessible to the two of us that we are both confident it should be made part of the February 28th release. On the other hand, if he is unable to finalize the design in the next two weeks then I strongly believe the two of us should delay committing anything to master branch regarding the Fortran binding upgrade until the next release cycle. The reason for that choice is to avoid any last-minute rushes where mistakes tend to be made. Furthermore, my own time commitments as release manager start interfering more and more as we approach the end of this release cycle. For example, I need a fairly long time to do my normal large set of tests just before release. Furthermore, there are some release script changes I still need to do because the svn commands in those scripts need to be replaced by the equivalent git commands. Also, Arjen has some additional time commitments of his own for PLplot concerning propagating API changes to Tcl and Fortran and probably also a general testing effort on Windows platforms as well which will likely interfere with his work on the Fortran bindings if that work isn't finished soon (with my editing help). So delaying getting Arjen's new Fortran design until the next release after this one is a potential down side of this firm deadline. On the other hand, this firm deadline is sufficiently far in the future so you all have a good chance to get further changes such as the plmeta and/or wxwidgets changes we have recently been discussing or the Fortran, Tcl, Ada and OCaml propagation issues we have discussed in the recent past) committed to the master branch and therefore made part of this forthcoming release which will be based on the master branch. So in general, I would like to see a surge of commits from all developers who are actively working on something right now in the next 5 weeks to the master branch. Then in the final two weeks of this release cycle before February 28th, I plan to request an informal code freeze on the master branch (except for bug fixes and the necessary script changes from svn commands to git commands referred to above). This plan avoids large last-minute changes (which I feel are always a recipe for disaster) and should also allow time for me and anyone else who wants to help with testing for their own platform to do complete testing of this release and to deal with any bugs or regressions those tests reveal. Alan (your friendly release manager). __________________________ 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming! The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. 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