GoldenDict v1.5 target date and open issues

[chulai]

Hi fellow developers,

Has the release date for v1.5 already discussed? For me it' has been a very long wait since the last stable official version, 1.0.1, is from December 2010! And there have been so many improvements and fixes since then.

Looking at Milestones 1.5 in GitHub I see there are only 9 open items:
https://github.com/goldendict/goldendic ... state=open

But also there are 20 open items that have not assigned milestone:
https://github.com/goldendict/goldendic ... state=open
Maybe we can prioritize these issues and put some of them in the post-1.5 backlog.

Finally, the milestones page, https://github.com/goldendict/goldendic ... milestones states under 1.5: "The next major release, hopefully coming early spring.". Is this spring 2013? If so we have missed that tentative target date.

Thanks!

[Tvangeste]

I very much support the desire to release 1.5. It is time for release.

Looking at the 1.5-tagged bugs, and removing non-essential ones, I see some installer-related ones for Windows and a couple of MacOS X related bugs.

MacOS-related support for retina will be fixed when we switch to Qt5, but we are not there yet so it seems we could skip those as well.

So at the end we only have a couple of bugs, most important is switching to Qt installer. I'm not familiar with Qt Installer and not sure how much work would it take to properly implement our installation on top of it.

If that's too much, we might just update the current nsis files and be done with it. Let's release 1.5.0, and we could make maintenance releases afterwards, also hopefully much faster.

I know a lot of folks who still use GD 1.0.1 since that's the official release, and they are missing out of all the great new features.

ikm, are you in?

[ikm]

We would need: 1) a changelog for 1.5 from 1.0, 2) installer packages for the platforms, 3) 1.5 tag on a github. All files could be uploaded directly to github (I believe there's some 'releases' features there which allows not only tagging releases, but even uploading binaries). I could do any changes needed to accommodate the website and whatnot, but i wouldn't have time to build and test binaries.

From the release side, I would propose 1) branching current master to something like '1.5-release', 2) building final installer binaries RCs from that branch, 3) releasing those for testing, 4) if fixing is needed, perform the fixing in '1.5-release', rinse and repeat from 2). Once the final last RC is good, build a final 1.5 which is essentially the last final RC with the version changed to 1.5.

The reason for a separate branch is to make sure no new changes go there, only RC-critical fixes.

For binaries, it would be great to have scripts to build them. If needed, those can be hosted in different repos on the goldendict organization on github. Anyone would then be able to perform builds and do future releases with ease.

There's also a business of asking all translators to provide final translation updates. This basically involves sending each translator an email with the instruction on how to do the final update (preferably with a personal .ts file attached to translate). Each email should mention that they are not obliged to do this, of course, but it would be beneficial for the project release to have a translation without any untranslated strings.

@Tvangeste, fwiw I just gave you owner rights on the goldendict organization at github.

[Tvangeste]

@ikm, sounds like a plan.

I've just created a special 1.5-dev branch that we will use to release the version 1.5.

I'm going to look into installers (nsis/scripts/qt-installer) during this week and see if we could switch to qt-installer framework easily.

@chulai, would you mind taking the communication-related tasks? I mean, sending the messages to translators (and also a message about sound icon ) ?

Here's the link to the 1.5-dev ts files to use: https://github.com/goldendict/goldendic ... dev/locale

So, if everything goes according to plan, we would have a proper RC build in a week or two, and assuming we need another RC and would also need some time for translations to be done, here's the preliminary schedule:

1. First 1.5-RC with installers by the end of August.
2. Second 1.5-RC2 with installers and most translations by September 15th.
3. Final testing done by September 28th.
4. Release 1.5 on Sunday, September 29th.

@timonwong, @Abs62, any concerns and/or corrections?

[chulai]

MacOS-related support for retina will be fixed when we switch to Qt5, but we are not there yet so it seems we could skip those as well.

Yes, but we could at least add support for font auto-scaling as I explained at https://github.com/goldendict/goldendic ... t-22878983 It doesn't seem to be a big effort at all. I could test on some OS X versions but I don't currently have a Mac with retina support. Anyway, I don't think it can't look worse than not doing anything.

I know a lot of folks who still use GD 1.0.1 since that's the official release, and they are missing out of all the great new features.

Yes, that's my main concern as well. A new v1.5 will give Linux package maintainers on all main distributions a hint that we have a pretty stable release and it's time to update from upstream.

[chulai]

@chulai, would you mind taking the communication-related tasks? I mean, sending the messages to translators (and also a message about sound icon ) ?

Yes, no problem. I already sent a request to the designer of the sound icon. I will prepare an email for the translators too.

Besides updating the website with the new GoldenDict features we should also:
1) Update source code and project description at http://sourceforge.net/projects/goldendict when we have the final 1.5 tag. Or delete this project as it will cause confusion.
2) Update source code and project description at http://gitorious.org/goldendict/goldendict when we have the final 1.5 tag. Or delete this project as it will cause confusion.
3) Contact package maintainers of the main Linux distributions so they can get the code from upstream to make a package with 1.5 version.
4) Build and release a new portable Windows version at http://portableapps.com/apps/education/ ... t_portable
5) Contact package maintainers in the OS X community and ask them to create configuration files for Fink, Macports and Homebrew. There is a ticket for this: https://github.com/goldendict/goldendict/issues/124

[Tvangeste]

@chulai, would you mind taking the communication-related tasks? I mean, sending the messages to translators (and also a message about sound icon ) ?

Yes, no problem. I already sent a request to the designer of the sound icon. I will prepare an email for the translators too.

The icon has been integrated, thanks!

As for the localizations, I've just lupdated them to sync with the latest code so they are ready to go (to the localizators).

[Tvangeste]

@chulai, I see that you've added a bunch of branches to the main GoldenDict repository:

* noiframewebdict
* scanpopup
* window-cleanup
* clear-button
* xdxf-support-enhanced

Are they really needed or is this just a side-effect of wrong pushing with --all (or similar)?

The branches seem to be rather old and outdated. We probably should better be keeping such changes in pull requests rather than polluting the main namespace with them. Every person pulling from our main repo would now get (and see) these branches, and this will add to overall clutter in the repository.

What do you think?

[chulai]

Yes, by mistake I git-pushed with --all. When I realized I deleted just the most recent branch and forgot about the other ones. Now I deleted also those old branches. Thanks!

[chulai]

Hello guys,
* Any news on the installers / scripts to build v1.5?
* I've been following the issue with GCC at viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2091&start=210 Have the crashes been sorted out? If so, I don't see any other pending issue for 1.5
* Most translations have been updated. We have chances of getting updates of Arabic and Turkmen files but in regard to the rest, I don't hold my breath as I didn't get any reply and a whole month has passed.