Hello again, Lucee-verse. Here’s something I like to see: I sat down to craft a post about Lucee 5.2.2 (RC), and while perusing the recent posts here, I see a bunch of posts about the recent release candidates, even before I’ve posted about them! Can’t keep good developers down. Great to see you all beating me to the punch, and hacking away at Lucee 5.2.2.
Ok, so, here’s the latest on this whole RC business. As I mentioned in my last post, with the increased adoption of Lucee, we’re slowing down our release cycle just a bit, primarily so that we can test releases more before we declare them final. We unit-test the bejeezus out of Lucee during development, but real-world testing is an entirely different matter. Thus, as more people are using Lucee, we need a formal testing/hardening period for the community with each release. Enter, release candidates!
Here’s how we’re adjusting the monthly release schedule:
- After each sprint, we’ll post a release candidate. This is a fully-tested release, using the automated unit testing that’s part of the development/build process.
- We’ll leave RC’s posted for 1 month. During the RC period, we’ll take any feedback we can get from the community, and we’ll update the RC throughout the month. In addition to community testing, we’ll also be doing testing under real-world conditions in LAS member environments, with key Lucee users/firms, etc.
- After a month of finalizing/hardening each RC, we’ll then make that a formal Lucee release. Along with promoting the current RC to full release status, we’ll simultaneously post a release candidate for the next release version in line.
Applying this to the current Lucee development schedule, today we’re announcing Lucee 5.2.2.70-RC. (This is actually a bit late; the RC’s will be closer to the beginning of each month in the future.) We’ll leave this up until the end of July, updating it along the way as needed, based on user/community feedback. We’ve actually already done this here in July. 5.2.2.70-RC is actually the second RC for 5.2.2. At the end of July, we’ll make 5.2.2 final, and we’ll also release 5.2.3-RC. Rinse and repeat each month.
Make sense? Please let me know if there are any questions. If anything’s confusing, it’s my fault, so let me know if there’s any cleanup needed for the communication here. If you’ve been with Lucee (or Railo before) for a while, you’ll recall that we used to have development, preview and stable releases. What we’re doing now is essentially the same approach, except that we’re calling the builds snapshots, release candidates and releases, respectively.
Moving on to the sprint schedule, the May-June sprint is complete, and we’re now just incorporating any last-minute fixes/tweaks into 5.2.2-RC. The July sprint is underway, and will produce 5.2.3-RC at the end of July/beginning of August. I’ll post about any 5.2.2-RC updates then.
Meantime, here’s a quick retrospective on the May-June sprint:
- Tickets completed: 47
- Total tickets processed: 63 (not all tickets created get formally added to a sprint)
5.2.2 Release Notes
As mentioned previously, we’re still working on a fancier (and more complete!) system for creating formal release notes. For now, the completed ticket list remains the best detailed documentation of what’s included in each release. In addition, for Lucee 5.2.2, we spent a lot of time improving locking/synchronization (and thus encapsulation), and also the compiling/recompiling implementation. Note that these improvements were driven by tickets/bugs/regressions, and weren’t drawn from the product roadmap (those kinds of changes are for minor versions only, not monthly releases).
What’s Next
Have a look at the ticket lists above, and let us know if you still have questions about 5.2.2. And keep sending us your input here, or via tickets. We’re tracking your input carefully, as it’s the best way for us to keep Lucee improving constantly.
If something important to you wasn’t addressed in 5.2.2, there’s still a bit of time left for tickets to be added to the July sprint.
The downloads site has been updated to reflect the new RC builds:
http://download.lucee.org/?type=abc
Talk to you again in a few weeks when 5.2.2 is fully-baked, and 5.2.3-RC is ready to go into the oven. We’ll share the August sprint plan then, too.
Thanks for listening.
P.S. I’ll be at the cf.Objective() conference in D.C. next week, along with a bunch of other LAS members, so please feel free to pull me aside to discuss any and all Lucee topics. I’m all yours, anytime.
