Oolite Bulletins

This has probably been asked before but I couldnt find a message on it....

Are you all using "trac" or something similar to work out whats in each build/release & its current status - and if so where does it hide?

There's the issue tracker on Github and the "bug reports" forum here for bugs.

Features ... particularly large or disruptive features might get a proposal in the Discussion forum as part of considering whether they're something with potential to include in the next version. (And around half will get dropped or heavily amended as a result of that discussion). This "Suggestions" forum obviously contains a lot of (mostly) smaller requests. The branches list on Github will sometimes have big features while they're being worked on.

As far as roadmaps and release goals and all the rest go, not really. Essentially we do a release when "enough" features have been added since the last one, no-one has anything still on their list they expect to finish "soon", and we don't know of any serious bugs.

As cim said, the github repository is what we would call the Development Headquarters. If you visit that page every now and then, you can see first hand what is going on in the project, which commits are going into the game (your reference here is the branch called master, which represents the actual base used for releases, nightly builds etc, the other branches are experimental or active new features development). You can follow ongoing discussions in the issue and pull requests pages of the repository and also participate, if you have a github account already set up.

Speaking of nightly builds earlier, there is also the nightly builds status page provided by our build robot, terrastorage: http://terrastorage.no-ip.info/oolite/status.html. The status pages allow you to grab and test for yourself builds that represent whatever we are working on at that specific time of their production. If you visit that page frequently and just read what changes are going in every new build, you can have a very good idea of what is new in the project.

Finally, and specifically for the very soon upcoming 1.82 version, you can see what is new in the related page on the official Oolite site: http://www.oolite.org/whatsnew/.