[tor-talk] Towards new stable releases (0.2.4 through 0.2.9)

[Nick Mathewson]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 5:19 PM, Nick Mathewson <nickm at torproject.org> wrote:
> Hi, all!
>
> As part of an effort to actually be predictable about supporting old
> releases, I'm hoping to put out stable releases of 0.2.4 through 0.2.9
> some time early next month. (See [1] for our planned schedule of when
> we're dropping support for what.)
>
> This isn't an easy effort, though!  Some of those release series
> haven't  seen updates in quite a while.  Moreover, the 0.2.7 branch
> had drifted substantially far away from what a stable release should
> backport, and I had to re-create it starting at the last 0.2.7 release
> [2].
>
> Because of this, these stable releases are probably going to need more
> testing than usual before we can call them ready for mass consumption.
> So instead of just testing them internally, I'm putting up the some
> preliminary source distributions now.  You can see them at
> https://people.torproject.org/~nickm/volatile/stable/ [3].  Each of
> them has a "-dev" suffix in its version number to indicate that it is
> a development version -- not yet an official release.

Update: I have just uploaded new tarballs to the above directory.
They are still not the releases, but they may become the releases some
time this week.  They now have ChangeLogs files.  I'm not anticipating
any more fixes in these upcoming versions of 0.2.4 through 0.2.9,
though there are one or two more fixes we'd like to get into
0.3.0.4-rc before it comes out.

Same caveats and requests as before apply.

> If you're interested in helping make sure that the next stable
> releases really are stable, and you're already experienced at building
> from source, please give one or more of these releases a try.  (If you
> don't build your own "tor" from source, don't worry. You probably
> don't want to touch these yet.)
>
> Any bug reports would be really helpful, especially if there are any
> regressions since the previous stable version in each series.
>
> I hope that in the future, a clear backport policy combined with a
> more regular habit of putting out stable releases will keep us from
> having to do big backport collections of this kind.
>
>
> [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/CoreTorReleases
>
> [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20512
>
> [3] I am aware of the contradiction in the URL.

peace,
-- 
Nick