Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

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jreinhardt
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by jreinhardt »

So now that 0.14 is out of the door, maybe we can reflect on what went well and what could be improved, and write it down on the wiki page, so we don't have to remember it. I just dug through this thread again and tried to reconstruct a timeline that might serve as a rule of thumb for future releases:
  • It took about 3 months from the start of the discussions (April, 28th) to release (July, 1st/13th).
  • Translations of the application started May, 11th and ended May, 24th, so two weeks.
  • Release notes where started already in February viewtopic.php?f=21&t=5667
  • Translation of the release notes started around May 25th, which coincides with the end of the application translation window. This is actually a good idea, as sometimes during translation of the GUI one finds things that changed and should go into the release notes. Plus the translators have only one task to focus on at a time.
  • About a week before the release (June, 25th) a date for the release was fixed and release candidate builds started to trickle in
  • Release happened on 1st of July
  • A bug fixed version was uploaded on 13th of July
One has to consider that this was the first release in quite a while, so some things took longer than they would take when releases happen more regularly.

Then I would like to throw in a few ideas for discussion:

This thread became the central place to discuss everything related to the release. I think it is a good idea to create such a thread for each release to have a place to discuss. In fact that could be the official start signal for the release preparation.

A significant part of the discussions in this thread was about what to include and what to leave for later. I would propose to put this at the beginning of the release process. So start by sorting out the branches, pull requests and issues on mantis that have accumulated, and assign them to this or a later release.

There were quite a few problems found after July 1st, when it was used by a lot of non-reqular users. Do you think having an official release candidate for one or two weeks before the final release would help with this? Or will this only be tested by the people who run daily builds anyway? Or is it smarter to have an official release with all the publicity, and make a bugfixed release a few weeks later like this time?

There was a bit of confusion with slightly different revision numbers for the various binaries. Would it make sense to have a branch for every release where bugfixes go if necessary so that it is a clear for providers of binaries and packagers what to build? Or a tag?

Should we try to actively make publicity for a release? We could make a list of news sites/blogs/... that we can tell about it to create a bit of a buzz? I guess a good place to start such a list would be the "FreeCAD on the web" thread.
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yorik
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by yorik »

Good post!

Starting a new thread such as this one before each new release is an excellent idea. This will help a lot to streamline the release process I think. A lot of issues can be discussed beforehand, and it helps the developers (myself for example) not to forget about the release :). I think we could decide a provisory release date already (on the tracker it is currently set for end of september. I suggest to keep that as a target for now), and start that thread around begin of september.

About release candidates, it seems to me that the "day-to-day" freecad is already tested enough by regular users, that not many other people will download and install a release candidate, and that in most other opensource projects, they also need to issue a "bugfixing" release all the time... With blender it has become almost a rule :) I don't think having a release candidate will avoid that.

About the different version numbers, surely we can find a simple way to avoid that. I would suggest that when we create a release branch, we add tags to the commits that are to be used for making builds, or something like that.
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shoogen
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by shoogen »

yorik wrote:About release candidates, it seems to me that the "day-to-day" freecad is already tested enough by regular users, that not many other people will download and install a release candidate
I disagree. For the 0.13 release we spent multiple weeks with release candidates. And in view that release was way smoother than the 0.14 release.
The transition was quite disruptive. And we could have better spend more time for testing. Or even better. People neither using the PPA nor compiling by themselves should have better spent more time testing their code.
jreinhardt
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by jreinhardt »

I also think that 0.14 would have benefitted from more testing by "normal users". The question is, if we publish a release candidate, do "normal users" actually test it and give feedback?
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yorik
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by yorik »

well okay then...
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bernd
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by bernd »

Regarding the post of Johannes (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6441&start=200#p57083)
yorik wrote:Good post! ...
+1

Regarding RC. I compile FreeCAD constantly on Linux only. I don't have a glue how to compile FreeCAD on Windows. I even don't know how to install a compiler (Is there a setup.exe for gcc ;) ) and where do I get all the librarys from. But on the other hand more than half of the time I'm on the way using windows. If there would have been a RC for windows I would have used it. But latest windows build has been 3389 from 5. of April for a long time. That is why I vote for at least one RC on windows, too.
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by mrlukeparry »

I admit I've not kept up to speed with this release. Thankfully it's out of the door and when I find the time I'll start working again finishing things off.

To be honest I didn't realise the release was officialy out. There wasn't really a big mention on the website and Iwould have expected a brief mention on a few sites like libregraphicsworld etc. Can we better ourselves next time?

I think we really need to push for smaller bug fix release and use the tagging functions in GIT. I suppose we have to bare in mind, linux distros will pick up the latest version. RCs now seem appropriate for critical bugs, but later we have to be more stringent with a testing plan - especially since we are engineering CAD software.

We have to bare in mind normal users differ from new users. New users unfamiliar with the program, not knowing the correct workflow or issues are definitely going to find more ways to break FreeCAD.

I don't know if anyone agrees but the packaging process seems to take too long - maybe because I'm used to compiling in 10 minutes ;). Perhaps it's my naive viewpoint but these automated build systems should quite easily now build an updated version of a package? Is Ubunut PPA making this more difficult than it needs to be?

I definitely think we could improve the windows build atleast to improve compatibility with different versions of VS then I'd be happy to contribute unofficial builds to help with testing because it's always under tested in Windows especially in early development.
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NormandC
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by NormandC »

Luke, the Daily Builds PPA is fully automatic, but the Stable PPA isn't - and that was my choice. It took a few days because I wanted to clean up the build dependencies - IMO it was long overdue.

And please note that I released the bug fix release on the same day the tarball was published so I'm a little annoyed you'd say the packaging took too long. :roll:

And BTW I'm the only one who thought of making an announcement (on G+).
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by mrlukeparry »

normandc wrote:Luke, the Daily Builds PPA is fully automatic, but the Stable PPA isn't - and that was my choice. It took a few days because I wanted to clean up the build dependencies - IMO it was long overdue.

And please note that I released the bug fix release on the same day the tarball was published so I'm a little annoyed you'd say the packaging took too long. :roll:

And BTW I'm the only one who thought of making an announcement (on G+).
Sorry, I looked at it the wrong way. I somehow got the impression it took a while to do perhaps it stemmed from problems last year as I remember wanting to look at the OpenSUSE build service.

And yes, thanks for keeping g+ updated. Otherwise I'd have never found out ;)
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NormandC
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Re: Any nearer to FreeCAD 0.14 going GA.

Post by NormandC »

I just sent a note to Libre Graphics World about the release but I know I'm in Alexandre Prokoudine's G+ contacts which means he's surely aware.

Unfortunately we can advise these sites but they choose whether to report it or not. In the past I tried to get major Ubuntu blogs interested and I was ignored. They just don't give a f... about FOSS CAD. (I'm not talking about LGW here, Alexandre has blogged about FreeCAD in the past).
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