Django

There has been a lot of activity on Django's trunk this week, but this isn't reflected in the ticket count. The overall open ticket count has increased to 49; this count contains an extra 3 documentation/translation tickets, for a total of 35. This ... [More] means there are 14 substantive tickets blocking a release candidate -- which is the same as last week. Although the number of substantive tickets is the same as last week, there has been progress. Several tickets were closed during the week, but an equal number were opened or re-opened as a result of additional testing. The new issues that have been reported are mostly edge cases that were missed by earlier fixes, such as the special handling required to allow for loading code from eggs. On a positive note, the serious performance regression reported last week has been fixed. The {% url %} template tag has been modified to avoid backtracking problems during template parsing. As a result of the new tickets, it's unlikely that we will fix all the RC-blocking bugs by April 19. Therefore, we're going to push back the RC date by another week. This means we are now targeting a release candidate around April 26, with a final release around May 3. As always -- any and all assistance is most welcome; the more assistance we get, the faster 1.2 will land. [Less]

We're getting close now! We're down to 46 open tickets, of which 32 are documentation or translation updates. This leaves 14 substantive tickets before we can have a release candidate. The good news for the week is that we are now at Zarro ... [More] Boogs for the ORM component. That means there are no known ORM issues blocking a release. The bugs that remain are evenly spread between admin, forms, templating, and internationalization. The bad news is that there has been one serious regression. Revision 12889 fixed ticket #12945, but in the process introduced a backtracking regular expression that significantly slows down the parsing of {% url %} template tags in certain circumstances. This problem has been logged as ticket #13275, and will be fixed before we make a release candidate. In light of the otherwise good progress this week, we are not changing the expected release date. This means we are still targeting a release candidate around April 19, with a final release around April 26. As always -- any and all assistance is most welcome; the more assistance we get, the faster 1.2 will land. [Less]

Another good week of progress towards the 1.2 release milestone. We are now down to 54 open tickets, of which 28 are documentation or translation updates that can be addressed after the release candidate lands. This leaves 26 substantive tickets ... [More] before we have a release candidate. Although we've been reducing the ticket count by 20-30 tickets per week, some of the progress this week was due to a purge of tickets that were not critical to the 1.2 release. This means we have really had a slight slowdown in progress over the last week. This isn't entirely surprising; as we get closer to the release candidate, the complexity of the tickets that remain tends to increase, as the difficult tickets usually get left until last. When this slowdown is combined with the fact that this weekend covers the Easter break, it's unlikely we're going to squash all 25 RC-blocking bugs by April 5. Therefore, we're going to push back the RC date by another 2 weeks. This means we are now targeting a release candidate around April 19, with a final release around April 26. As always -- any and all assistance is most welcome; the more assistance we get, the faster 1.2 will land. [Less]

This week has seen more good progress towards the 1.2 release milestone. We are now down to 69 open tickets, of which 23 are documentation or translation updates that can be addressed after the release candidate lands. This leaves 46 substantive ... [More] tickets before we have a release candidate. To help squash this bug list, there is another development sprint planned for this weekend. If you can spare a few hours to help kill some release blocking bugs, why not join in! Add your name to the list of sprinters on the wiki, and join us online on IRC in #django-sprint. There's no change to the estimated release dates this week. We're still aiming at a RC1 release around April 5, with a final release around April 12. As always -- any and all assistance is most welcome; the more assistance we get, the faster 1.2 will land. [Less]

At the time of our last blog post, there were 120 tickets open. Over the last week, we have purged a bunch of tickets that weren't critical to the release of 1.2, and we have made 50 Subversion commits. There have also been a couple of new ... [More] tickets added. As a result of this activity, 84 tickets remain. Of those tickets, 21 are documentation and translation updates. This leaves 63 substantive tickets that need to be addressed before we have a release candidate. There are three areas in particular that have large ticket counts. Not surprisingly, these areas correspond to the three areas of biggest change in 1.2: Regressions in query behavior caused by the multi-db refactoring, Changes in admin behavior caused by the admin javascript improvements, and Edge cases in localization handling. Many of these issues are small oversights or minor corrections. However, there are a couple of tickets (for example #13023) that aren't trivial, and will require some significant design work. As a result, we're going to push back the expected release date by another 2 weeks. This would put an RC1 release around April 5, with a final release around April 12. To help speed things along, we'll be running a development sprint focused solely on tickets for 1.2; if you'd like to join in, add your name to the list of sprinters on the wiki. We're aiming to sprint either this weekend (March 20/21) or next (March 27/28), depending on which weekend has the best availability for the folks who sign up. As always -- any and all assistance is most welcome; the more assistance we get, the faster 1.2 will land. [Less]

Those of you that have been paying attention to the Django release roadmap will have noticed that the original estimated release date for Django 1.2 final has passed, but we haven't actually made a final release. Although Django's release cycle is ... [More] generally date-based, we also try to keep our release dates flexible to account for bugfixing time. At the beginning of the development sprints at PyCon a few weeks ago, over 300 tickets were still open on the Django 1.2 milestone. Now it's down to 120 (we've been clearing out, on average, about ten tickets a day), but that's still a lot more than we're comfortable shipping; as a result, we're pushing back the final 1.2 release a bit. Some of the tickets still open for 1.2 are documentation or translation updates; these will be dealt with before the final 1.2 release. Others are minor bugs or edge cases which are difficult to trigger or unlikely to cause serious problems in actual deployment; these tickets will likely be bumped to a pure-bugfix release in the 1.2 series, or to 1.3 as warranted. Over the next couple of days, the Django core team will be reviewing all of the currently-open tickets, and identifying those which: reveal a significant flaw in a feature added during the 1.2 cycle, or have the potential to cause data loss or other serious consequences in actual deployment. Tickets which don't meet these criteria may be removed from the 1.2 milestone, or may simply be left out of the final release. We won't forget about these issues -- they'll still be in Trac, and they will be addressed -- but bugfix work prior to the 1.2 release will focus in major issues fitting the criteria above. We're sensitive to the fact that during the Django 1.2 release cycle, we haven't paid as much attention to bugs and smaller features as we have done during previous releases. To address this, we're considering making Django 1.3 a "feature light" release -- that is, we will spend more time focussing on little features and long standing bugs, rather than adding lots of big features like we have done with Django 1.2. Once 1.2 lands, we'll have some more details about our exact plans for the 1.3 cycle. Until then, we'll be posting here every few days to give you a status update, letting you know how many tickets remain, any problems we foresee, and to provide an updated estimate of the 1.2 final delivery date. So: there are 120 tickets remaining, but quite a few of these of these will be bumped from the final release. It's difficult to know exactly how much work is left before we do the final ticket cull, but our first-cut revised estimate is for an RC1 release around March 22, with a final release around March 29. This is, for those of you who were following along during the early parts of the 1.2 cycle, roughly consistent with extra time added to the release schedule for the 1.2 alpha and beta milestones. As always, any assistance preparing, reviewing or testing patches is most welcome; the more help we get, the sooner we can release. If you want to help out, check out the 1.2 todo list, find something that sounds interesting and dig in! [Less]

As part of the Django 1.2 release process, tonight we've released Django 1.2 beta 1, a preview/testing package that gives a little taste of some of the new features coming in Django 1.2. As with all alpha and beta packages, this is not for production ... [More] use, but if you'd like to try out some of the new goodies coming in 1.2, or if you'd like to pitch in and help us fix bugs before the final 1.2 release (due in April), feel free to grab a copy and give it a spin. You can get a copy of the 1.2 beta package from our downloads page, and we recommend you read the release notes. Also, for the security conscious, signed MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the 1.2 beta package are available. Also, note that this release constitutes the final feature freeze for Django 1.2. No further new feature development will take place before the final 1.2 release; only bugfix work will be accepted in trunk until 1.2 lands. [Less]

As part of the Django 1.2 release process, tonight we've released Django 1.2 alpha 1, a preview/testing package that gives a little taste of some of the new features coming in Django 1.2. As with all alpha and beta packages, this is not for ... [More] production use, but if you'd like to try out some of the new goodies coming in 1.2, or if you'd like to pitch in and help us fix bugs before the final 1.2 release (due in April), feel free to grab a copy and give it a spin. You can get a copy of the 1.2 alpha package from our downloads page, and we recommend you read the release notes. Also, for the security conscious, signed MD5 and SHA1 checksums of the 1.2 alpha package are available. [Less]

Registration is now open for the first DjangoSki Conference in Whistler, March 2-4 2010. DjangoSki is a conference with a difference. It's set in the ski resort of Whistler, British Columbia and is half conference, half un-conference and, erm ... [More] , half skiing. Come to the conference and meet with our keynote speakers: Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Matt Berg and David Ascher, then go skiing on the hills with everyone in the afternoon. Most of the rest of the conference is composed of ad-hoc talks, sprints and lightning talks. However if you'd like to speak there, we'd love to sign you up for a talk in advance. Afternoons, we break for skiing before reconvening in the evening. There's lots more to talk about, but check out the website for more. Early birds are on a first come, first served basis but will run out on January 13th, so sign up soon. We look forward to seeing you here. — Andy McKay, DjangoSki Conference Chair [Less]

I'll pass the microphone over to Jeremy Dunck, our volunteer Sprint organizer: There will be a Django Development sprint in Uptown Dallas next weekend (Dec 12 and 13). A development sprint is an excuse to get together, write some code, and ... [More] have a good time doing it. The purpose of this sprint will be to help finish features and push out bug fixes in preparation for the Django 1.2 release, which feature freezes January 26. If you're interested in coming to work on other open source Django-based projects, that's welcome too. We'll be meeting at CoHabitat (2517 Thomas Avenue, Dallas, TX 75201) and I'll be there to open the doors at 9am both days. RSVP via Eventbrite if you're interested. There will be another gathering in the Triangle, NC area, meeting at Carrboro Creative Coworking, (205 Lloyd St, Carrboro, NC 27510). For more information, please check out the wiki pages (Dallas, Triangle, NC). We're looking for sponsors (lunch, coffee, beer, firewood, etc.), so out the sponsors section of the wiki and add yourself (or your company) if you'd like to bring something. If you can't make it to Dallas or Norh Carolina in person, join us in the #django-sprint IRC channel and help out that way. Hope to see you there! [Less]