The 7.5 stable release cycle was definitely different from 7.3 and 7.4. There were significantly less issues addressed (~60 vs. ~90) and it took more time (7.3 took two months, 7.4 took three months, and 7.5 took four months).
Our Tomcat difficulties definitely delayed the release by two to three weeks. The number of issues was affected by the fact that I've not been able to do significant development work since June (July I was gone, and since August I've been distracted by classes, an ICSE paper, an NSF grant proposal, a Dr. Dobbs journal article, and an ICSE workshop proposal). The good news is that my Fall distractions are mostly gone, and I'm hopeful to get back into hack mode during this release cycle. Also, my classes are helping me identify the cream of the UH software engineering students who I will be approaching soon to see if they are interested in becoming the next generation of Hackystat hackers. So, it's all good. During this release cycle, I am primarily concerned with the Zorro/SDSA mechanisms, which Hongbing is doing a great job with, and the continuing redesign/debugging of the DPDs, which Cedric, me, Aaron, and Austen will be working on. I also want to see if we can modify the project definitions to be more compatible with Aaron's project structures. There's some HPC stuff that should be happening in this release cycle. I want to finally finish the sensor design chapter. Plus all of the inevitable other small stuff. So, lots of good stuff, can't wait to see how it all works out. Cheers, Philip
