[Lina-dev] Upcoming in Beta 04

[Nile Geisinger]

Hi everyone,

We're working hard on Beta 04 here which we hope will turn into the 
official 0.72 release. Beta 04 is incorporating all of the fixes to 
critical and not so critical bugs that have been reported in the forums. 
In addition Beta 04 includes the LINA developer tools, making it the 
first release that enables you to create universal LINA binaries and 
installers for all operating systems.

One suggestion that we can't get in this release, but will work hard to 
get in the release following it are unified installers. Currently, we 
are creating universal Linux binaries, but we wrap them in specific 
Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX installers. *oiaohm 
<http://openlina.org/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=86>* 
pointed out the usabilities problems with this approach and *Natanael 
<http://openlina.org/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=72>* 
suggested an elegant solution that will enable us to create one 
installer for an application that will install on all Windows, Mac OS X, 
and UNIX platforms. There are so many benefits to having just one 
installer for all platforms that we're going to make it a high priority 
in our next development cycle.

The high priorities in Beta 04 (which should become 0.72) are the following:

* developer tools for creating LINA binaries and installers
* well-written documentation that explains how to use the developer tools
    * we're using docbook and outputting in half a dozen formats)
    * we're also conducing usability testing internally on the 
documentation and the developer tools
* stable application installs and guarantee that programs run

The first two items are largely finished and we're working on usability 
testing the developer tools and documentation.

The last item is one that I personally am going to spend the next month 
working on. We know from the feedback in Beta 02 and Beta 03 that there 
are specific points where the installers can fail. We have identified 
these fail points and are going to incorporate fixes and then just 
repeatedly test them until we're happy with the quality. We've also 
identified one particular place that can cause applications to fail to 
start and we're going to fix this and try to break it as well.

Thanks for all your feedback and input -- it's making this process a joy 
and enabling us to quickly identify problems and improvements,

Sincerely,

Nile Geisinger