Approaching the 1.5.0 Release

I'm dressing up as the release manager for Parrot this month, hoping to push 1.5.0 out the door without any major issues. This is going to be quite an impressive release for our community because 1.4.0 was a deprecation point, and 1.5.0 is going to be the first release where not all features present in 1.0.0 will still be available. And a lot of old "features" have been through the grinder this month.

Because of all the massive changes and removals of features, I sent an email to the list a few days ago asking for a freeze on big changes or branch merges starting today and lasting through Tuesday. I want to make damn certain that trunk is stable when it's time to push it out of the nest. To that end, I am asking everybody who is reading this blog post right now to get the latest version of Parrot trunk from SVN and submit a smolder report on your platform. These reports are very important, and will give us the information we need to be confident about Parrot's stability on Tuesday. It doesn't take much time to put together a smolder report, and it's amazingly helpful to us.

Because of the feature freeze there is active development going on in some branches. I expect some of these to be merged in to trunk shortly after the 1.5.0 release. I'll post some information about a few of these tomorrow.