Saturday, October 23, 2004

The Mechanics of a Release

So I know I said I'd get 2.6 out this week come Hell or high water, and it still might happen (depending on your definition of "week"). But you can't always predict everything, such as when work is going to blow up and take all of your time. These things happen. However, I do have good news: the code is finalized and ready to go. The final candidate went very well and only minor modifications were needed. So that's all done and ready for release. But unfortunately there's more involved in a release than just code. I'm going through the release notes right now and some of the build scripts. I think I'll make an English-only release available on the website this time as well (it's about 640K vs. the full 1.6MB download). There's also the possibility for some kind of press release to publish on news websites, which I'd have to pull together. And the website needs to be updated, which is probably the biggest hurdle. As I've mentioned before I tend not to give the website a lot of attention as web design is not my forté. A very nice person volunteered an alternate design that's better, but I haven't had the time to work with her yet. I may use the one that I linked to here a while back temporariliy and get the better one online next week at some point so 2.6 can come out sooner rather than later.

Be back soon with more details of the release....