Release of 0.18

[triplus]

Release notes and video is something that could improve in the future. What usually happens is a few days before release something gets documented and recorded. If somebody would commit a hour or two per week, through entire development cycle. To take care of logging new features and improvements. And to write that down or make a video of it. I feel that would likely end up being the best release notes and video ever produced for FreeCAD.

As for signing the AppImage. @sgrogan you likely have a GPG (private/public) key somewhere? For Launchpad purposes and things like that? Signing the AppImage with it should be a rather straightforward process. As i assume you will create the FreeCAD 0.18 AppImage. If we would want to sign AppImages produced on Travis. We would likely need to create a new GPG key for this purposes and include it somehow in Travis build procedure. Likely both public and private key. It goes without saying, private key must stay private.

If i remember correctly @bblacey once offered to provide something like that. If it can be done in a rather secure way, having such key available, signing the AppImage should likely be possible after.

[sliptonic]

Release notes and video is something that could improve in the future....

Not really. Like it or not, the release milestone is a news event. There's a window of opportunity in which tech sites, social media, and blogs will amplify the signal. This is an opportunity to make new users aware of FreeCAD in general and make existing users aware of a new release.

Documentation, including videos can (and should) be incrementally improved over time. But a release trailer is designed to catch attention and raise awareness. It's meant to be shared. It's a one-shot deal. It can't be really long or overly detailed. Maximum effectiveness is probably around five minutes. Avoiding voice-over maximizes multi-language sharing.

That said, there's a couple ways I intend to improve it after it's live:
1) cards will be inserted that link to relevant features. So when the NavCube is shown, a card can link to the NavCube documenation.
2) subtitle translations can be added. This is much easier if it's not a voice-over video since the only translation needed is the titles cards.

IMHO, release notes are similar. They will be reviewed and shared as part of the news cycle. They should be mostly complete when the release is announced.

[Mark Szlazak]

Release notes and video is something that could improve in the future....

Not really. Like it or not, the release milestone is a news event. There's a window of opportunity in which tech sites, social media, and blogs will amplify the signal. This is an opportunity to make new users aware of FreeCAD in general and make existing users aware of a new release.

Documentation, including videos can (and should) be incrementally improved over time. But a release trailer is designed to catch attention and raise awareness. It's meant to be shared. It's a one-shot deal. It can't be really long or overly detailed. Maximum effectiveness is probably around five minutes. Avoiding voice-over maximizes multi-language sharing.

That said, there's a couple ways I intend to improve it after it's live:
1) cards will be inserted that link to relevant features. So when the NavCube is shown, a card can link to the NavCube documenation.
2) subtitle translations can be added. This is much easier if it's not a voice-over video since the only translation needed is the titles cards.

IMHO, release notes are similar. They will be reviewed and shared as part of the news cycle. They should be mostly complete when the release is announced.

Does a viewer have a way to change the language of subtitles? Are you going to have options for the 10 most spoken languages in the World? I can see the benefit of that.

[sgrogan]

As for signing the AppImage. @sgrogan you likely have a GPG (private/public) key somewhere?

I can probably do this for the PPA based AppImage, but I don't know how to build the Conda based AppImage. I think the Conda based (ie py3/QT5) AppImage should be the official release, and the PPA based one a "legacy" fallback, similar to how we handled 0.16 on the PPA.

I was hoping we could use the Travis generated, Conda based AppImage. If there is a way to sign this package it would be ideal. As we've discussed before I think it makes sense to include the offline docs for the release version.

[yorik]

@sliptonic, the video is AWESOME! Can't wait to share it around

I think all the remaining things (release notes, etc..) don't prevent from doing the release fork. Let's do these things in parallel!
I'm doing a last crowdin merge now.

[triplus]

@sliptonic

Ideally we would have more verbose release notes, short promotional release video and a bit longer release video related to what's new. A short PR statement wouldn't hurt. Now usually we do all of this a few days before release. And that is great, that it gets done. But i am guessing, that if there would be somebody taking care of the mentioned things, during the development cycle, it would be interesting to see the result of such approach. I mention this from time to time, as maybe somebody interested in contributing in such way decides and gives it a try.

@sgrogan

Sounds good. Once the release happens and the PPA/Conda situation settles i will provide the AppImage instructions.

P.S. One thing i don't remember reading about is if FreeCAD 0.18 Conda package is planned?

[wmayer]

I think all the remaining things (release notes, etc..) don't prevent from doing the release fork. Let's do these things in parallel!
I'm doing a last crowdin merge now.

Looks like there is a major regression with at least the German translation. Hundreds of already translated strings are now in English again. And when checking the .ts files then a lot of the source strings plus their translations have been removed.

[HarryGeier]

I was in crowdin today around noon, but just added votes and made a handfull of corrections ..

i was in draft.ts and the log says i voted and added 8 translations..

[Joel_graff]

@sliptonic

Ideally we would have more verbose release notes, short promotional release video and a bit longer release video related to what's new. A short PR statement wouldn't hurt. Now usually we do all of this a few days before release. And that is great, that it gets done. But i am guessing, that if there would be somebody taking care of the mentioned things, during the development cycle, it would be interesting to see the result of such approach. I mention this from time to time, as maybe somebody interested in contributing in such way decides and gives it a try.

I'd be willing to handle release notes, so longs as I have a reasonably easy way to track the changes that are occurring (as opposed to scouring the forum threads, anyway). Never have done something like this before, so maybe I should just keep my mouth shut... But I'm willing to try.

[fosselius]

git log is your friend

https://blogs.sap.com/2018/06/22/genera ... s-gitgrep/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/532 ... it-commits

maybe fetching issue descriptions for each commit with ticket id from mantis with:

https://github.com/catharsis/bugger

or roll your own web scrapper

extracting and analyzing big noisy datasets is awesome. wish i had time to burn on this.. so many ways to present the data and render graphs ^_^