Random Wibbles of Graham

Yes, this post is a little on the late side as the Beta was actually released just over a week ago, but unfortunately a combination of factors led to me being away for the last week without a chance to post this.

As Meik noted in his release announcement the time between Beta 1 and Beta 2 led to us closing in the region of 260 bugs, a large number and one which we hope will decrease between Beta 2 and the next release.

However since this is a bit late, I add a slight taster for you based on some other work which has been going on, the code for which you will see as we approach the release candidate phase.

To paraphrase the lyrics of a song, it has indeed been a long road getting from there to here, it’s been a long time but we’re finally here.

Or in simpler terms, we yesterday released the first beta of phpBB 3.0. Now whilst this is not a final release it is a major milestone in moving towards that release.

3.0 has been in development for a long time and on a personal level I’ve been through just about every possible position within the phpBB community and then the phpBB teams in the time from when development started to this point in time. We’ve had some major bumps in the road along the way, but we’re finally here.

If you have some technical skill, I encourage you to try out the beta and report any bugs that you find - although please do remember that this release is not intended for use in a live environment and we won’t provide support for doing so.

It’s a day late because I was busy with the actual process of releasing the new version (which does actually involve a fairly long checklist )

Anyway, yesterday saw the release of the latest in the phpBB 2.0.x line - 2.0.21. As usual I recommend you to update to this release as soon as possible.

The announcement can be found here

Sourceforge have finally completed their migration to their new CVS setup. This means that anonymous access to CVS is available again, but so more importantly is developer access, which has been down since last weekend.

If you are using phpBB CVS for test, please note that the server name has changed from cvs.sourceforge.net to phpbb.cvs.sourceforge.net. You will need to make a new checkout and use that in order to gain access to the latest changes.

The upside of this whole mess is that anonymous cvs is currently in sync with the developer cvs, so if that continues, changes we make will be available a lot sooner

There seem to have been a few comments of late implying that we do not do any testing of new releases and just throw random sets of code out at people. I’m not sure where you’ve got that impression, but to make it clear I’m going to give a brief summary of the release process.

Once we think that we’ve got a candidate for release, we’ll build some test packages and make these available internally to the team members to test and also to the members of the international support teams and a few others. We’ll probably also at this point upload the code to our own forum to give it a real world test. This equates to about 60 or so people having access to download the test packages and a much higher number actually using it on our own site.

If we get feedback on errors, or other issues arise via the security and bug trackers that need to be included in the release, we’ll rebuild these packages and try again.

This process tends to go on for at least a week unless there is an urgent fix to release, in which case it could be much shorter. Once we’re happy that there has been no new feedback for a while, we’ll prepare and announce the final release.

Now, I accept that 2.0.20 had some problems, but none of these arose in testing, and none of them affected all users of phpBB - each of them affected a small minority of users.

There were 3 main issues which have arisen -

1. An error in the code changes upgrade package. This only affected those using this upgrade method, which is those with heavily MODded boards who cannot upgrade in any other way. It was spotted and corrected quite quickly and determined to be an error in the script which generates this file from the patch file.
2. An issue affecting quoting when HTML is enabled. This only affected those running with HTML enabled, which is a configuration which we do not recommend. This is fixed in CVS and will be included in the next release. However, I do have to note, that Sourceforge’s public CVS servers are still not in sync with the developer ones due to a problem over a week ago. I’ll also note that we will not be making a new release purely because of this, it will just be included in the next release.
3. An issue affecting the visual confirmation feature with certain databases. This doesn’t affect the 2 database systems with the highest use amoung our user base, but yes it was a simple copy-and-paste error and will affect others. Again, it’s already fixed in CVS and will be included in the next release.

Now I accept that this has shown that there are some gaps in our test coverage before release, and I’ve started looking into changes we can make to increase that coverage, but to say that it wasn’t tested is highly inaccurate.

Or why update problems always arise when I want to be in bed.

This time though, the problems with the code changes package were brought to my attention as I got in on a Friday night and was planning on going to bed (as opposed to when I was getting up for work as happened once before). I thus spent about an hour and a half instead going round removing this package from the download page, updating the announcement and posting to several threads where there were queries about the issue.

And, no you didn’t misread that - I updated the announcement, and did so again when we updated this package and made it available again on Saturday. There are a number of people complaining that we didn’t comment on this issue, well all I can do is refer them to the release announcement and suggest they read all the messages in there.

As some explanation, the code changes package is an additional update method that we make available for those who have applied MODs to their board. These convert the changes from the previous release (so from 2.0.19 to 2.0.20 in this case) into the same format as the installation instructions for those MODs to allow them to make the changes by hand instead of just replacing the files (the simplest way to do it on a standard install). It turned out that due to an error in the script which generates this file, one change was missed in the update instructions. The problem did not affect any of the normal upgrade methods.

Today marks the release of the latest in the 2.0.x releases for phpBB - phpBB 2.0.20 the Golden Super Furry Linen edition.

This update once again contains a number of security fixes and bug fixes. Whilst there are no updates of a critical nature, we still recommend that you update your install as soon as possible to take advantage of the changes which have been made.

I know we’ve said this before, but I’m hoping that this will be the last release in the 2.0.x line before we release the first betas of the 3.0.x line. Of course, no promises

Oh and the name is a clue as to when we had planned to release this, but couldn’t

I couldn’t let today go past without a post noting that it’s 4 years to the day since the very first Golden Super Furry release of phpBB 2.0.x

There have been quite a few changes to the team behind phpBB in that time, but the project as a whole is still here and going strong with more to look forward to as we move ahead in 2006.

We have today opened the Bug Tracker for reports on phpBB 3.0 as we move towards the point where we release the first Beta of the software.

More details can be found in AcydBurn’s announcement, along with details of the new features and the areas on which we would like some particular focus, notably on the non-mySQL database support from those who use it on a regular basis.

I promised you a surprise a few weeks back, well here it is

Subsequent to my last post, we brought the main phpBB site back online at noon today. It is possible depending on your ISP that it may take a while for you to be able to access it, depending on how long they cache old DNS data for. The temporary support on our area51 site will remain open for a while longer to allow people to finish resolving any questions they had asked, but all new questions should be asked on the main site.

I’d like to express my thanks to all the guys at OSUOSL for their help over the last couple of days in getting the server physically installed and with the other updates we needed to do