I've been very reluctant so far to provide an explicit release date for
OpenOffice 4.1.2, because of some processes that were not under control
yet. A generic "late 2015" or "last quarter 2015" would be all you got
from me. This is still true, but I want it to be very clear that we are
targeting October not December here.
There are at least two good reasons for us to target October.
On one side, patience is over. Users deserve some good news. We, the
volunteers, need to feel useful and involved again. And, for a lot of
different reasons, everyone (including people you would never imagine)
would be happy to see an OpenOffice release in the very short term. So
OpenOffice 4.1.2 must be released as soon as we are able to ship a release.
On the other side, progress is remarkable lately. The last weeks marked
a surge in activity that is unprecedented in months. This week is
ApacheCon Europe time, so some actions (not decisions of course) will
appear on the dev list after the fact, but I expect that we iron out the
last Infra blockers. And QA will be reactivated as soon as possible,
with some volunteers already lining up for receiving bugs to check.
Here is a list of the current blockers:
1) Bugfixes: most of the patches for 4.1.2, especially the "risky" ones,
have been merged; we still have a few left, as well as a few fixes still
to apply to the already merged code; but this is mostly done. Besides
the really wanted bugfixes, the rest will be left out of 4.1.2 if it
delays our release.
2) SNAPSHOT binaries (actually SNAPSHOT will have to be moved due to a
Mac build breaker in the CoinMP upgrade, now fixed) must be available;
they will come; we will not use the buildbots since they are not usable
for release builds due to wrong OS versions.
3) We need a place to upload dev builds to. That place is ready as of
today at https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/openoffice/ ; but it
will still need some Infra work (access and quota settings) which I
expect to have ready soon.
4) QA. We need and want good QA on the snapshot, so that our first
Release Candidate has high chances of approval; 4.1.2 won't be
revolutionary after all, it is a normal release. But several people and
processes have changed, and we need a team of people ready to check the
builds.
So a realistic schedule, which is to be used mostly as a guideline but
which we should aim at respecting, is:
- Now (28 Sept, but also earlier): The AOO410 branch is in review then
commit mode. Don't commit to it unless you know what you are doing. We
can't enforce a delay between committing to trunk and AOO410, but be
careful.
- This week (by 4 Oct): we get all we need from Infra in terms of
access, disk space and information; last bugfixes get committed and from
that point on we only fix... the bugfixes themselves.
- By 7 Oct: we have a build available for testing (I do hope we have it
earlier, a build from the current SNAPSHOT tag would work too!); we give
QA and all volunteers a full week to test this snapshot.
- By 14 Oct: we have feedback from QA, hopefully we manage to quickly
apply fixes
- By 18 Oct: the Release Candidate is available as both source and
binaries. We vote.
- By 25 Oct: Vote passes. Site is ready. Builds are copied.
- Last week of October: release is announced.
There is some flexibility in both directions (if we are able to upload
test builds already tomorrow, why not? and conversely if we need an
extra Release Candidate, let it be); but it is clear that if you have
some time to spare for the project, it's better to allocate it in October.
Regards,
Andrea.
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