This is the official notice from your release manager that the soft freeze is in effect from now until the release. What this means in practical terms is during this test period starting now and ending with the actual release (likely ~10 days from now) you are strongly discouraged from pushing intrusive/large topic branches into the SF master branch other than documentation upgrades.
At the same time you are strongly encouraged during this test period to fix all bugs that don't require an intrusive change. For example, any bug fixes for the wxwidgets device are strongly encouraged at this time, because almost by definition those fixes will not be intrusive since they will only affect two components of PLplot (both of which can be classified as interactive), the wxwidgets device, and the wxwidgets binding. (And the Linux run-time trouble with a wxwidgets event that Pedro has been encountering with the wxwidgets binding, and and the Linux run-time trouble with large pauses I and others have been encountering for the wxwidgets device mean the wxwidgets components of our software is not in a very good state at the moment on Linux so again almost by definition any fix for those issues is not disruptive. Thus, I plan to strongly encourage pushes of such fixes right up to the day of the release. Assuming, of course, that the fixes have been sufficiently tested on all platforms that we are confident no disruptive build issues have been introduced by such fixes. In contrast to the Linux wxwidgets case, anything that significantly affects the core library is almost by definition disruptive. A good example of such a disruptive change is the large change I made recently to include/plplot.h. Which is why I made sure that change was completely tested on Linux before I pushed it substantially before this freeze date. This means we have been actually free of disruptive changes since that commit date, 6 days ago, and, of course thanks to Arjen's recent comprehensive test work, that change has also been tested pretty thoroughly on both the Cygwin and MinGW-w64/MSYS2 platforms. My plans for these next ~10 days (aside from a day or so off for Christmas) until the release are to encourage as best I can (within the limitations of my limited C++ skills) getting Pedro and Phil to deal with the two egregious bug issues for the wxwidgets device driver and binding on Linux (to the point I would be willing to delay the release by a few extra days if one of them felt they were on the edge of a breakthrough), respond to any more comprehensive test reports that people send me (by posting those results in our wiki if the comprehensive script completes or advising the tester what constraints on the comprehensive test they should make to allow the script to complete), deal with any PLplot regressions that might show up, and especially to mature my work on the large DocBook documentation update that I have had in progress for the last several months so that the DocBook changes can be pushed to master and DocBook results pushed to our website before the release. 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). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
