Ah, it’s so satisfying to get a release out the door. Inkscape version 0.41 has finally been released. This time around, I was made a “Freeze Warden”, which means I have some input in the release process. (Are all the critical bugs fixed? Are the translations updated? Are the builds correct?)
Another task I kind of gave myself was packaging the Win32 binaries. That’s pretty cool, and I’m quite impressed with the NSIS package that does the bundling. I didn’t write the bundling scripts Inkscape uses, but I got to play with the NSIS compiler itself. It’s very slick, and I recommend it for anyone doing Windows installs. (And I should note that hundreds of other software packages are already using NSIS.)
One thing that Bryce Harrington has helped keep in my head during the Inkscape hard freeze was that any given release isn’t supposed to be Bug Free(tm). It’s just supposed to be a release. This is very hard for me to keep in my head, so hearing a few times during Freeze is a good thing. Bugs in the release that we know about are just “Known Problems”. They’re in the tracker, and we’ll get to them some day, but not today. It greatly relaxes me to think about it that way. The pressure to produce is relaxed, letting me actually enjoy the release process instead of worrying needlessly about all the people that will hate us because it crashes when they click like this.
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.