Hi,

I have just gone to download compo.sr and the download page only seems to offer the latest unstable release candidate 32.
Where is the stable released version?
Am I missing something here?

Cheers
Ade

We are still in Release Candidate phase until there has been roughly 2 weeks with no non-trivial bugs. As this is an external rigid criteria there's no defined release dates, and we've been bumping through a lot of RCs.

I'll elaborate a bit more. With each RC I really hope it will be the last, but it's such a big product, and real usage is so diverse, things just keep coming to bite us. I just did an audit of the bugs we've fixed since the current RC, and there are still some I wouldn't consider trivial…

Search UI may crash if catalogues addon not installed
Reason for late discovery: Different addon install permutations tend to reveal problems over time, hard to test up-front

Addons may fail to reinstall and cause a site crash if manual file/database management activities had previously led to an inconsistent install state
Reason for late discovery: User error that has a worse result on the site than we'd want

Chat crashes if chat stats enabled
Reason for late discovery: Configuration we did not test, old code changed in v10 with unexpected result in different part of system

On Windows the installer may freeze at step 6, depending on hard disk speed
Reason for late discovery: Platform and hardware specific

File/media library mass delete feature fails
Reason for late discovery: A fairly deep new feature not properly tested when written

Midday dates for calendar events get added as midnight
Reason for late discovery: An incorrect bug fix in the last RC caused this issue

Member CSV import fails for files less than 3MB
Reason for late discovery: An incorrect bug fix a few RCs ago had widespread changes to file management code and caused this issue


So I'm about to release a new RC to correct these. The thinking is that we can only really have good confidence the issues are ironed out when there's been a quiet period. That's because:

1. We know that the last RC didn't create any new major issues
2. I think it's reasonable to think users will have some kind of limit to how much they will report in any period, so even though some bugs may have been observed before by users, they may not have been reported due to users being overwhelmed with setting up their site or reporting other issues or too bogged down to conclude set up and testing – so we want to give a nice clear period for anything else to get reported, to see that the users really have settled down comfortably

In the past we didn't have these policies, we released when there'd been "a reasonable period of testing". But them we ended up going through so many patch releases. I want the gold releases of Composr to be rock solid, and then for there to be a much lower number of patch releases. It's the ethos of reliability I want to foster, but it is quite a painful process to get through.

Thanks Chris,
That makes a lot of sense, thanks for elaborataing your approach.
Cheers
Ade