Forum OpenACS Development: 5.1 now in alpha testing; HEAD core open to new checkins

We've met all of the code-complete criteria, loaded new translations into 5.0.4, merged 5.0.4 back to HEAD, and branched HEAD to oacs-5-1.

What does this mean for HEAD?

The code freeze on HEAD core is lifted and we can now resume committing new code. This is a nice chance to move our game up a notch, and get out of the habit of breaking HEAD. So, please do the following before committing large change-sets to HEAD core:
  1. Run the automated test suite. Make sure that your changes didn't break anything.
  2. Do a fresh install using your new code, and once again, run the automated test suite.
  3. If you touched any upgrade scripts, install a 5.0 site and run the upgrade. Then, run the automated test suite.
Please do all of these items before committing big changes to HEAD. Of course, use your own judgement - a one-line change can still break install (guilty!) or a lot of test cases. If your development environment makes it really hard to do the steps outlined above, consider modifying your development environment to make it easier.

If you really can't manage to do the above, but you still want to commit big changes to core HEAD, please test your work on the test servers. After committing your code to CVS, you can trigger a server rebuild from the control web page, wait 12 minutes, and then see if the site installs and passes automated testing. You can also test upgrades from repository with this 5.0 server. Obviously it's better to do this sort of testing before rather than after committing, but it's still less total work if you find your own build-breaking bugs than if many other people all put time into figuring out why HEAD is broken and how to fix it.

What does this mean for 5.1?

We have 132 bugs to close or deprioritize before we can reach beta. Please don't commit any new features to 5.1 - just bug fixes. A test server for 5.1 is now available.