Monday, February 29, 2016

An unexpectedly expected release: 3.1.0 is available

Surprisingly, at least to me, we managed to make 3.1.0 release exactly as planned, i.e. today, without any delays. The price for this is that there are a couple of known problems in this release (see the errata on the release page), but we decided that it was not worth delaying the release for them.

This is not the most exciting release in wxWidgets project history, but it's still very much worth upgrading to as there has been a huge number of bug fixes in it, especially in wxGTK3 and wxOSX ports. Of course, as usual, there are a few new features as well, see the web site for a brief list and the change log for a fuller one and I'll try to find some time to write in more details about one of them, wxNativeWindow here in the near future.

The next goal is to release 3.0.3 to make at least some of the bug fixes, if not the new features, from 3.1.0 available to people using the system packages under Linux or just too cautious to start using the "development" releases (even although in my opinion this is not really justified as, on average, 3.1 branch has fewer, not more, bugs than 3.0.x one). As for 3.1.1, this will depend on how quickly the changes accumulate in the master, we'll see how it goes. In the meanwhile, we hope that you'll enjoy the new release!

Thursday, February 04, 2016

What g++ binaries for 3.1.0 release?

We plan to provide g++ binaries for the upcoming release, but we're not sure what are the versions and the build options that people would be interested in, so here is a quick poll to gather some information about this:

polls

Please select 1-3 options corresponding to the binaries that would be useful to you to allow us to make the best choice. Thanks in advance!

Monday, February 01, 2016

3.1.0 Is Coming

Although we've been talking about it since quite some time, this time we're really going to make a new release soon. To be even more precise, I firmly expect to make it this month. Of course, I did wait until January was over to announce it. On the other hand, I did not wait for the February to be over neither even though it's the shortest month of the year. On still another hand, we did wait an extra year for this release, presumably just to have one extra day to make it in February of this year, as opposed to the last one... In any case, barring something really catastrophic happening, we should have a pre-release on February 15 and the release some time after that.

Of course, deciding to make the release is not quite enough, there are other things to do too, such as applying at least the most urgent and long standing patches and fixing selected bugs. So this week-end I spent some time doing this and, as the result, instead of 49 3.1.0-critical bugs we now have only 20 of them which is not as good as I hoped, but better than I expected. Of course, some of these bugs were just postponed, while others turned out to be not bugs at all after all or to have been already fixed. Still, quite a few real bugs and, notably, a few regressions which really couldn't remain before the release, were fixed as well, so there is that. I hope to deal with the remaining bugs during the next week and maybe even apply some non 3.1.0-targetted patches too, but in the worst case we could just postpone all the remaining 3.1.0 tickets as there is nothing absolutely critical there (and only a couple I'd characterise as being moderately critical).

So things look cautiously good for 3.1.0 and if we make it according to the plan, thus proving that our new release scripts, updated after the switch to git, work, hopefully 3.0.3 will follow soon afterwards.