[Plplot-devel] Tentative plans for 5.14.0 freeze date, testing period, and release

[Alan W. I. <Ala...@gm...>]

I continue have a large list of different topics I would like to work
on for PLplot, but, on the other hand, comprehensive tests are looking
good (at least on Debian Buster) right now, and it has been much too
long since our last release (mostly because of the "new computer" and
"new distro version" issues I have been encountering).  So I plan to
spend the next several weeks working on the most urgent development
topics I have a good chance of finishing before the soft freeze, with
a proposed date of the freeze near the end of October followed by a
testing and debugging period with the actual release of 5.14.0
occurring roughly in mid November.  Please let me know if the general
timing of that soft freeze, testing period, and subsequent release
will cause you any issues with development topics you would like to
push before the release of 5.14.0.  But if I don't hear any strong
objections along those lines, then later this week I plan to finalize
that soft freeze date as October 27th (to be definite and to place it
on the last Saturday in October).

To give you more details about the actual events leading up to the
release, the overall timing of the release depends critically on the
soft freeze date, i.e., the date where we ask our developers to quit
pushing new development topics and instead concentrate on fixing bugs
and updating the documentation until the release is completed.  What
that means practically is just after the freeze date I will call for intensive
testing and use those results to solve as many bugs as possible
without introducing any new development topics.  That process will
likely take one or two weeks after the freeze date before I can start
the official release process currently described for Debian Oldstable
= Jessie in README.Release_Manager_Cookbook.  But that release process
(which normally just takes a day or two) will likely get stretched out
a bit because that cookbook likely needs quite a bit of updating as I
encounter issues that are caused by my current platform of Debian
Buster.  In sum, the official release should occur something like two
to three weeks after the soft freeze date depending on the
participation from you guys in the testing, how difficult it is to
sort out the bugs found by that testing, and how much I have to
upgrade the release process for Debian Buster.  So that's how the
currently proposed freeze date of October 27th gets transformed into a
release date that is roughly in mid November.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

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
__________________________