Hi folks -- I wanted to fill everyone in on our plans for the Django 1.5 release. The highlights are:
* Feature freeze October 1st, final out before Christmas. * One marquee feature of Django 1.5 is experimental Python 3 support. This is where we need your help the most: we need to be sure that our support for Python 3 hasn't destabilized Django on Python 2. We need lots of testing here! * Most features of 1.5 have already landed, but we're also hoping to land the new pluggable User model work, add support for PostGIS 2.0, start the process of deprecating django.contrib.localflavor, and a few other small things. * This'll be our first "master never closes" release: work, including new features, can continue to land on master while we ship the release. Please read on for details. Timeline -------- Oct 1: Feature freeze, Django 1.5 alpha. Nov 1: Django 1.5 beta. Nov 26: Django 1.5 RC 1 Dec 10: Django 1.5 RC 2 Dec 17: Django 1.5 RC 3, if needed Dec 24 (or earlier): Django 1.5 final (All dates are "week of" - we'll do the releases that week, though not neccisarily that exact day.) Notice the longer-than-usual timeline from beta to final. We're doing this to provide some extra time stablizing the release after landing the Python 3 work. Please see below for details and how you can help. Python 3 support ---------------- Django 1.5 includes experimental support for Python 3 (it's already landed on master). We're taking a "shared source" approach: Django's code is written in a way that runs on both Python 2 and Python 3 (without needing 2to3's translation). This means that we've touched nearly the entire codebase, and so the surface area for possible bugs is huge. WE REALLY NEED YOUR HELP testing out Django 1.5 *on Python 2*. Please grab master, or one of the upcoming alpha/beta/RC releases, and test it against your apps and sites. We need you to help us catch regressions. We're not yet recommending that people target Python 3 for deployment, so our main focus here is ensuring that we're still rock-solid on Python 2. If you *want* to give Python 3 a whirl things should be pretty solid, but we *especially* need real-world reports of success or failure on Python 2. Features in 1.5 --------------- Besides the stuff that's already landed (see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.5/), there are a few other features we're hoping to land: * The "pluggable User model" work (Russell Keith-Magee). * Some early low-level schema alteration plumbing work (Andrew Godwin). * Moving django.contrib.localflavor out into individual external packages (Adrian Holovaty). * Support for PostGIS 2.0 (Justin Bronn). * Python 3 support in GeoDjango (Aymeric Augustin). * App-loading (Preston Holmes) is "on the bubble" - there's some debate among the core team over whether its ready, but it's close. Of course, as with our previous releases, the *real* list of what'll go in 1.5 is "whatever's done by October 1st". If you want to help with any of the above areas, contact the person doing the bulk of the work (listed above) and ask to help. And if you have other features you'd like to land, get 'em done! Master never closes ------------------- This'll mark our first release where "master never closes". To recap: in previous releases, once we hit feature freeze we froze the development trunk, forcing all feature work out to branches. In practice, this meant months-long periods where new features couldn't be merged, and led to some stuff withering on the vine. That's not going to happen this time. Instead, when we release 1.5 alpha we'll make a 1.5 release branch right at that point. Work will continue on master -- features, bugfixes, whatever -- and the aplicable bugfixes will be cherry-picked out to the 1.5 release branch. The upshot is a bit more work for us committers -- we'll have to be sure to merge the aplicable commits over -- but no more "sorry you have to wait three months to merge this work." I'm very happy about this! [Committers: I'm happy to assist with this porting of bugfixes from master to the release branch.] See you on the other side, folks! Jacob -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
