[sdcc-devel] SDCC 4.5.0

[Philipp K. K. <pk...@sp...>]

Dear SDCC developers,

I think that current SDCC trunk is quite stable. SDCC 4.4.0 was already
a quite stable release, and 4.5.0 has seen many bug fixes since. There's
not a lot of new features, but on the other hand that does further help
stability.

So I'd suggest to aim for an SDCC 4.5.0 release at the beginning of next
year, just two months away, to bring this stability to users, before we
start breaking SDCC again next year.

There are a few remaining issues:

* A GNU/Linux on powerpc64 regression tets failure for z80. This test is
not really failing, it just needs a little bit more time than the
current 60s timeout limit. Not something that would block a release.

* We still have a few open serious Windows bugs. I hope we can fix them
(for one of them, there is already a patch by Janko), since AFAIK about
half of our users are on Windows. But if we can't fix them all, we might
still want to release, since none of them are new regressions after 4.4.0.

* There hasn't been much regression testing on unusual OSes or with
unusual SDCC command line options. This can still be done during the
remaining time.

* We don't have a release manager yet. This needs to be fixed.

* We currently don't have documentation and Windows snapshots. This
needs to be fixed.

I suggest the following release schedule:

2024-12-03: soft freeze
2024-12-18: hard freeze
2024-12-20: RC1
2024-01-02: release

I hope putting the RC1 testing period into typical holiday time will
allow many users to participate in testing.

Philipp