First, I want to thank everyone who contributed code to the development of 3.2, in particular, Brent Easton, Bob Davison, Michael Kiefte, PIeter Geerkens, George Hayward. Lance Leung, Tim McCarron, and Ken Stevens. (I think this is everyone, but if I’ve omitted you from the list, please accept my thanks all the same.) Second, during 3.2 development, there were some module developers who used our test builds and doggedly pursued us about bugs they found until we fixed them—among these were mroyer, Rindis, and barbanera. 3.2.0 would be much worse without your efforts.
I also want to thank the people who keep things running so that developers have time to code: Tim McCarron, who goes above and beyond maintaining the module library, Rich Johnston who promptly dispatches news to the news feed, Ed Massena for his Users’ Guide, and those redoubtable souls who answer user questions in the forum and in the IRC channel.
That said, what’s next?
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There will be an initial period where we get a lot of bug reports for 3.2. This happened with 3.0 and 3.1; I expect it to happen with 3.2, though my hope is that it will be less than the other times, due to our having fixed a huge number of bugs during 3.2 development, the fixes for which are already present in 3.1.20, and 3.2 having had a lot more real-world testing before being released than previous major versions had. We shall see. In any case, dealing with and fixing what new bug reports we get is something we will need to tend to.
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I18N. 3.2.0 has some new strings in it which should be translated, but I didn’t want to hold up the release just for that. We need to get our translators organized to update the i18n files. It’s been so long since we last did this, that I don’t know who did the translations for 3.1. I could use some help rounding up those people, or new volunteers, to update the translations for German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese. I think there’s also a Portuguese translation which someone contributed during 3.2 development, which I’ll see about adding to a 3.2 point release.
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Documentation. The Users’ Guide needs to be updated for 3.2, as does the Designers’ Guide. The latter also needs to be included with some 3.2 point release. We need someone to make whatever changes haven’t yet been made for 3.2 to the HTML help files, as well.
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VASL is having a problem right now, due to having no developers managing releases. We’ve seen two symptoms of that so far: First, several of the most frequently reported open bugs in our tracker are VASL bugs which were fixed (by George Hayward and Lance Leung) months ago, but haven’t appeared in a VASL release. I’ve pestered various people about this on and off again for quite some time now but without success to get 5.9.3 released with these fixes, both because dealing with reports about fixed bugs wastes our time and because it’s bad for VASL users. Second, VASL 5.9.2 isn’t compatible with VASSAL 3.2—but Lance Leung and I (mostly Lance) have already done nearly all of the work for a VASL release which is. I have a working copy on my laptop which runs with 3.2.0. Again, we’re facing the same problem: I’ve been unable to get anyone to turn the crank to make a release happen. In fact, I’ve been unable even to find out who built the 5.9.2 release. Since the brunt of the complaints about VASL bugs and compatibility fall on us, I propose that we build the next two VASL releases ourselves—5.9.3, containing the existing fixes to 5.9.2, and 5.10.0, which will be 3.2-compatible—just becuase it will save us time, but after that we insist that the VASL community find somebody to do it, as that’s healthier for them and for us.
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VASSAL 4. I’m making good progress on my V4 demo. I expect that by the end of January, I’ll have something which works, demonstrates my ideas, and has enough documentation so that other people can understand and evaluate it. (This might be too optimistic, given that I’m travelling during a big chunk of December and that we’re moving house at the beginning of January, but this is my goal…) At that point, I think we’ll be able to discuss in more detail how to proceed, and make a plan and define tasks and milestones. I don’t want to send us down a road I haven’t scouted to my satisfaction, which is why I’m working on this myself for now.