<div dir="ltr">Hi devs,<div><br></div><div>Many thanks for all your hard work. I've just made the release of the second 5.0 beta.</div><div><br></div><div>We still have a number of features close to ready to ship. We originally planned for a February 1 shipping date, which hasn't worked out. That's OK - it's much more important that we ship things that work well, even if a few weeks late.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So, I propose we use another fortnight for final merging of the remaining content in gerrit. I don't expect that everything there will get in. Ultimately that's up to you people, voting with your feet on what code you develop, review and test! I propose that I will ship the release candidate on Wednesday, February 12. Happy to move this either way if there's good reason!</div>
<div><br></div><div>At that time, a release-5-0-patches branch will appear on our git servers. The only content that can go there must fix a bug or enhance documentation. We will not be dribbling in refactoring and completion work, such as we did during the 4.6 releases. master branch will remain the place for new content, and the content from release-5-0 branch will be merged to it. I plan to have a 5.1 release during this year, probably in spring.</div>
<div><br></div><div>We will need another few weeks after feature completion, to go through fixing and adding to the documentation, prompt tutorial authors and third-party software developers to update for 5.0, test for simulation performance on all the different kinds of systems we run on. I'll propose a final release date at about the time of the release candidate.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Cheers, and thanks again!</div><div><br></div><div>Mark</div></div>