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 __________________________ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
