V4.5+ Testing Channel Changelog

Announcements
4

v4.5.4-0

Released in Testing Channel updates on 17th January 2023.

Our first Stable Release Candidate built using Poetry.

Again we have a little more difference than the main developers would have liked. One of the remaining key legacy code components, Buildout, our prior build system, scuppered our intended interim releases of 4.5.1-0+ in the last couple of months. The intended-for-release code-state at that time failed the final rpm build due to a zc.sourcerelese (2012!!) dependency within our Buildout build system. We had a slight difference between how we build for development, and how we build for our rpm releases. This difference has now been removed along with all traces of Buildout. The replacement is the new shiny of Poetry. This needed to happen sooner rather than latter anyway. Hats-off to buildout and co for working (mostly) for all these years.

Immidiate roadmap

The above is intended primarily to help define our path to the next Stable release as quickly as possible. We do not have the resources, at least currently, to carry two build systems. And so we must move to have master branch (stable) and testing branch (testing) built by the same modern method.

Thanks

I would again like to thank all those who have practices such rigour and patience as to get us this far - both here on the forum and toiling away in the background. As stated before, we have had less than ideal release cadence as although we develop in the open via GitHub, such changes as have been required of late, has rendered rpm releases either un-buildable or otherwise unworkable. But a return to a more fervent release cadence is now foreseeable. In a major way this is down to user feedback. We do have, down to the efforts of the venerable @Flox, an ongoing effort to improve our automated testing. In this case via yet-another excellent open-source tool, mentioned previously, from our upstream of openSUSE: http://open.qa/. But that news is for another day. But while on the testing topic, if momentarily, we do now, via the %check scriptlet, run all our existing unit tests prior to each and every rpm build. Another improvement brought on by the somewhat forced re-jig of our entire build system. Note also the rocsktor-jslib and licensing clarification improvements referenced below.

Changelog summary:

Noteworthy is not an inconsiderable effort towards our new Leap 15.4 compatibility: I know, but better late than never. Plus some repo enhancements: that should help with further community involvement; again news for another post, post publication as it were.

A gentle request

(repeated for emphasis :slight_smile: )

As as been our way, or mostly intended way, we have always encouraged, and been encouraged by, user feedback. The testing channel is king in this regard, especially given the massive number and far reaching nature of recent changes. We very much need this release tested to its extremities. Please report here on the forum, in discrete threads, issues that you find that are not already identified in our GitHub repos. The intention, now we are back to hopefully more frequent releases, is to push things fast and often to the relatively new ‘testing ground’ of the testing branch. We need to, as quickly as possible, get our entire project rid of it’s technical dept. And the changes in these releases should help get us along the way of this next part of our journey.

Test away and report rapidly as we work against the forces of kipple.

Enjoy and report.

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