Dear SMF Community,
Since the release of the last Release Candidate (RC) for the 2.1.x branch of SMF, we have been continuing the development of this new version on GitHub. There are 267 issues tagged for RC3 that have already been closed, meaning that those issues have already been solved and any fixes have been implemented. There are just two issues which remain tagged for RC3, and these are currently being reviewed by the developers.
As you may have noticed, there is now a Release Candidate 4. This is a change from the previous plan, which has resulted in almost every issue that was tagged for 'Final' now being tagged for RC4. The reasons why we have decided to go for another Release Candidate are as follows:
- Number of issues to test: When RC3 is released, it will include a total of 269 fixed issues. This is a significant number and we believe that having another milestone would be better for testing everything that we have added to ensure that the fixes have been implemented successfully, instead of going directly to 'Final'.
- Limiting the scope: We want to ensure that the release time between RC3 and 'Final' is as short as possible. Even though we have tagged almost every issue for RC4, if a new arises that is not related to Security, Upgrade, Calendar or Database, it will be tagged for 'Final'. Also, we have a number of issues which have been tagged for RC4 that already have a fix awaiting them as part of the release of RC3. On that basis, the number of outstanding issues will decrease significantly as soon as RC3 has been released.
- Potential experiment with 'release early, release fairly often': in view of a clear roadmap and the limits having been established for RC4, we might try to see if we can experiment with and achieve this kind of approach. If we can make this work to our satisfaction, it might help us to develop the software more quickly and efficiently for future versions and patches. Please note that this is neither a guarantee nor a promise, but it is an idea that we are hoping to implement if possible.
Thank you for your patience.
Kind regards,
The SMF Team