[LLVMdev] [Announcement] 3.3 Release Planning!

[Bill Wendling]

Happy April!

[Contrary to the day, this is not an April Fool's joke. ;-)]

It has been several months since the release of Clang 3.2. Now is the time to start thinking about the next release! The (very) tentative schedule is testing in May and a release in June.

What This Means For You

Now is the time to start thinking about which features you are currently working on and getting them wrapped up. As usual, we will be cutting our branch near the beginning of May. At that point, all new features should be mostly complete. Any patches accepted after we branch must be only of a clean-up or bug fix nature.

Supported Platforms & A Call For Testers

This is also the time to start thinking about which platforms we want to support. We currently support the following platforms:

• MacOS X (x86)
• Linux (Ubuntu - x86)
• FreeBSD (x86)
• Windows (experimentally)

We would like to support ARM again. Also, there has been significant improvements on other platforms. The only thing keeping us from releasing binaries for non-Intel platforms is a phalanx of testers for those platforms. The more testers we have, the better.

Because LLVM is an open source project, we rely upon the community members' copious spare time to help us push the release out. Not only do we need testers for new platforms, we also need testers for platforms we currently support. Please email me directly if you are interested in becoming a tester.

What does it take to be a tester? I'm glad you asked! You are volunteering your time and resources to test each release candidate. You are given a week to compile the release candidate in a bootstrap build (a script is provided). You then have to run the regression tests and the full test suite, and compare the results from the test suite run to those of the previous release. Any regressions need to be reported as quickly as possible so that people can fix them. You then send the binaries to me so that I can post them for external developers. Rinse. Repeat.

There are normally two rounds of testing. If something major comes up during the second round of testing, we will need a third round. But we try to avoid that as much as possible.

The last step is to package up the binaries so that they can be uploaded to the llvm.org website.

And that's it!

As May approaches, I'll send out a more solidified schedule for the release. I'll also begin warning people of the impending doom^H^H^H^Hbranching.

Cheers!!
-bw

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