[Plplot-devel] This next release cycle should finish in early 2018

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

The 5.13.0 release has now been completed.  (See my recent post to
plplot-general for links to the details).

I encourage all of you to test the website (I already know of one dead
external link there to Homebrew packaging of PLplot, but I hope none
of you find any many more of those), and test this release tarball by
downloading it, using gpg --verify on it, and building PLplot with it.

And similarly with

git tag --verify plplot-5.13.0 
git checkout plplot-5.13.0

and building and testing that version.

The freeze on pushes to master is now rescinded, i.e., you are strongly
encouraged to push any private topic branches to master that you have
matured to your satisfaction.

I hope to continue the pace of a release every 6 months on average,
but 5.13.0 was 7 months after 5.12.0 so to make up for that I would
like to release in late January 2017, i.e., 5 months from now or a
year after 5.12.0 was released. That deadline is actually pretty soon,
so please start working on whatever interests you with PLplot now to
give the rest of us the maximum time to evaluate your work before the
next release.

Here are some development topics I am aware of that might make
it into the next release.

@Phil: Your private topic branch dealing with a setjmp/longjmp
implementation of C exceptions still needs a small amount of work in
my opinion to mature it (see my last suggestions to you about how to
mature that topic). Can we get this topic going again?

@Jim: I was reminded while writing up your work on the gdi device
driver in README.release, that this is "a first step to a
Unicode-aware driver that uses the GDI+ API (along with the Uniscribe
API to handle Unicode text)."  Are you willing to start that next step?

Arjen:

Your comprehensive tests on MinGW-w64/MSYS2, Cygwin, and MSVC (+ Unix
tools to help with testing) are really important since they are
fundamental to improving our build system for those platforms. 
Nevertheless, because 5.13.0 was late we jointly decided to make the
compromise of putting off some of your planned comprehensive testing
until after 5.13.0 was released.  So now that that post-release time
has arrived what is the next test you have planned here?

For my own part I have a massive ToDo list of all the minor issues
discovered during the last release cycle that I put off fixing until
later. Well "later" has arrived!  Therefore, during this release cycle
I hope to work steadily through at least a substantial fraction of
these issues.

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).
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Linux-powered Science
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