FreeCAD News

“Releas­ing JAX­A’s HTV7 car­go vehi­cle from the ISS” by Astro_Alex is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Last week a group of FreeCAD admin­is­tra­tors, main­tain­ers, and devel­op­ers met to dis­cuss the next release of FreeCAD. We decid­ed to begin the process of cre­at­ing our next release now. The tim­ing is appro­pri­ate because:

1. It has been almost a year since the 0.20, which was released on 13 June 2022, and many new fea­tures have been added in the interim.
2. The work-in-progress towards merg­ing Realthun­der’s topon­am­ing solu­tion is pro­gress­ing. It has reached a point where the next por­tion of code to be merged will start to neg­a­tive­ly affect FreeCAD’s per­for­mance. Ulti­mate­ly those per­for­mance prob­lems will be addressed through opti­miza­tion, but there will be a peri­od of time when the devel­op­ment ver­sion of FreeCAD will have degrad­ed performance.

For these rea­sons it makes sense to make a new release now, before the poten­tial per­for­mance drop, so peo­ple have a per­for­mant ver­sion with recent fea­tures to use. 

Every­body was expect­ing the next release to be tagged 1.0, and to have a work­ing solu­tion for topon­am­ing. Since this inter­me­di­ate release doesn’t include a work­ing solu­tion yet, it won’t be called “1.0”. 

Con­cern­ing the nam­ing of this release, there were oth­er sug­ges­tions, such as nam­ing it ver­sion 0.30 or even 0.99. In the end, it seemed best and least con­fus­ing to stick with the cur­rent scheme until 1.0 is released. This inter­me­di­ate release will be tagged “0.21”. 

Release schedule and tasks

A rough time­line of the release process includes the fol­low­ing major milestones:

1. Release announce­ment (today).  By announc­ing the release we are noti­fy­ing all con­trib­u­tors of an immi­nent “Fea­ture Freeze” in prepa­ra­tion for the release.  Any devel­op­er with Work In Process (WIP) should strive to pre­pare a Pull Request. If the work isn’t ready to merge, the PR may be left in DRAFT.
2. In approx­i­mate­ly two weeks, the main­tain­ers will review the open PR queue. Any open PRs will be tagged either for the 0.21 release or pushed until a lat­er release. Any new PRs received after this review will be tagged for a lat­er release.
3. As soon as all PRs tagged for 0.21 are merged, we will enter a hard freeze peri­od dur­ing which only bug fix PRs will be merged.
4. A release can­di­date will be pre­pared and we encour­age thor­ough test­ing and bug report­ing.  Devel­op­ment effort will focus on resolv­ing crit­i­cal bugs.
5. When all crit­i­cal bugs are resolved, a final release will be tagged and released.

Addi­tion­al­ly, We have a num­ber of impor­tant tasks to per­form to make the release hap­pen. A roadmap has been set up at https://github.com/orgs/FreeCAD/projects/4. Please con­tribute there and noti­fy of any issues that you think should be solved for 0.21.

Besides the tasks already in the roadmap above, we’ll also need to:

• Trans­late as much as possible
• Ver­i­fy that the doc­u­men­ta­tion is more or less up to date for all workbenches
• Pro­duce a win­dows installer
• Pro­duce a MacOS dmg
• Pro­duce a Lin­ux Appimage
• Migrate the release notes at https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0 to 0.21 and ver­i­fy they are complete
• Pro­duce a release text to be put on the blog and social networks
• Select a splash screen

Documenting the release

We also want to use this release as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to doc­u­ment the release process in the devel­op­er hand­book at https://freecad.github.io/DevelopersHandbook/.  This will help future releas­es be more stream­lined. We ask all pos­si­ble con­tri­bu­tions here to help writ­ing this and mak­ing FreeCAD releas­es a more open and trustable process.