[Jython-dev] Planning the Jython 2.7.1 release

[Jim B. <jim...@py...>]

It's time for us to plan the Jython 2.7.1 release schedule. I'm going to
suggest the following dates:

   - Beta 1 on Thur Sept 10
   - Beta 2 on Thur Oct 8
   - Release Candidate on Thur Nov 5
   - *Final release on Thur Nov 19*

These dates may slip a few days. However, bugs that are not completed in
time for the release will slip to 2.7.2 (or later), with the 2.7.2 release
scheduled for May 2016, in time for PyCon.

The process of releasing betas and the release candidate provides two
important benefits:

   - Jython users can evaluate and test Jython without building from source
   - Jython developers can triage the most important bugs, per the state of
   the development cycle

For example, perhaps the most important bugs for us to fix in 2.7.1 are
those necessary to make Jython installation more robust; see
http://bugs.jython.org/issue2345, http://bugs.jython.org/issue2346,
http://bugs.jython.org/issue2350. While this installer work is
straightforward, let's face it, it's not exactly what I would most prefer
to work on ;) The betas help ensure we do get it fixed, especially now that
we have a number of installation failure scenarios to consider that we
didn't conceive of in our earlier testing for 2.7.0.

2.7.1 development has continued on a nice pace. It's of course slower than
the wrapup of 2.7.0, but that simply was not sustainable with the resources
we have. However, it seems also to be perfectly fine - all reports and
certainly my own usage is that 2.7.0 has been a very robust release once
installed. (My own focus with Jython has recently been in using Jython, and
developing tooling for Jython, such as WSGI support by Fireside,
https://github.com/jythontools/fireside)

I would like to highlight two important sets of changes that have landed in
trunk and will be included in the 2.7.1 release:

   - Jeff Allen fixed a number of import bugs, such as relative imports
   generating incorrect bytecode.
   - Stefan Richthofer, as part of his GSOC project on JyNI, has
   significantly enhanced Jython's gc to work with CPython-style
   refcounting/native allocations, as need for code using the C Extension API
   provided by JyNI.

- Jim