Mozilla 1.4 Release Candidate 2 Coming Soon

Monday June 9th, 2003

Asa Dotzler has posted a message to netscape.public.mozilla.seamonkey announcing that Mozilla 1.4 Release Candidate 2 is close. Several fixes have landed on the 1.4 branch since 1.4 RC1 was released and only a few 1.4 blockers remain. Testers should focus their efforts on today's and tomorrow's branch builds to ensure that there are no regressions or further blockers. With luck, 1.4 RC2 could be available as early as tomorrow.

Full Article...

#1 Why are these labelled Release Candidate ?

by the_Rebel

Tuesday June 10th, 2003 11:40 AM

If there are still known blockers, why is it being called a "Release Candidate" ?

#2 Re: Why are these labelled Release Candidate ?

by sremick

Tuesday June 10th, 2003 12:26 PM

Agreed. I don't understand the dev team's insistance on rocking the boat as far as naming conventions are concerned. This runs counter to common-sense.

Alpha: Preview. We know it has tons of bugs, but this is just to whet your appetite. If we let you see an alpha at all, consider yourselves lucky.

Beta: Getting close to release. Bugs are coming down. Certainly let us know if you find more, but we're well aware that there are a bunch of bugs and unfinished features. We're working on them.

Release Candidate: We think it's done. We've squashed all the bugs we know about (or intend to bother with for this release). Let us know if you find any showstoppers, otherwise these bits will go gold.

#5 agree with you

by youying

Tuesday June 10th, 2003 7:09 PM

Totally agree with you !

#6 Re: Why are these labelled Release Candidate ?

by kmwade

Tuesday June 10th, 2003 8:49 PM

Read the full article. I think Asa is saying RC2 will be released when these blockers are fixed.

#11 Re: Re: Why are these labelled Release Candidate ?

by sremick

Wednesday June 11th, 2003 7:57 PM

If there are known blockers, those bits aren't "release candidates" unless it is mozilla.org's intention to release a milestone with known blockers.

It is a beta and should be called as such.

These terms have accepted meanings in the industry. I wish mozilla.org would follow convention, as not doing so is understandably confusing people and ruffling feathers. I know it's just semantics but all the more reason for mozilla.org to not rock the boat. I see no reason for them to not just call this Beta 3 as it should be. There is no benefit to them to mislabel these pre-releases and instead they are furthering their image of being stubborn and ignoring common accepted behavior (a growing opinion only strengthened by AOL's influence on the project and the Firebird episode).

#13 Read the post

by JimDabell

Thursday June 12th, 2003 3:32 AM

"If there are known blockers, those bits aren't "release candidates" unless it is mozilla.org's intention to release a milestone with known blockers."

Please, read the post you are replying to. The RC hasn't been finished yet. Unless the known blockers aren't fixed, it's perfectly okay to call it an RC.

#15 Ok

by sremick

Thursday June 12th, 2003 5:57 PM

Hmmm suppose you're right, it appears they want to release-candidate the release-candidate by having people run the 1.4 branch. We'll see what happens to the blockers.

Of course, they could always demote them to "critical". The following should list all the critical AND blockers still in the system with targets of 1.4 or earlier (why some bugs have targets for old versions of Mozilla, I don't understand):

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&target_milestone=mozilla1.1beta&target_milestone=mozilla1.2alpha&target_milestone=mozilla1.1&target_milestone=mozilla1.2&target_milestone=mozilla1.3&target_milestone=mozilla1.4&target_milestone=mozilla1.1final&target_milestone=mozilla1.2final&target_milestone=mozilla1.3alpha&target_milestone=mozilla1.3beta&target_milestone=mozilla1.3final&target_milestone=mozilla1.4alpha&target_milestone=mozilla1.4beta&target_milestone=mozilla1.4final&long_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&keywords_type=allwords&keywords=&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_severity=blocker&bug_severity=critical&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=exact&email1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailqa_contact2=1&emailtype2=exact&email2=&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&votes=&changedin=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Bug+Number&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=

Oh well. Still looking forward to 1.4, regardless!

#7 Re: Why are these labelled Release Candidate ?

by GuruJ

Tuesday June 10th, 2003 9:58 PM

I assume that each Release Candidate has no known 'blocker' bugs.

However, after each RC is released, new bugs will be collected, assessed and some will become *new* blocker bugs before the next RC can be released.

#3 Crash bug reproducable

by turi

Tuesday June 10th, 2003 12:30 PM

I've reported a crash of the 1.4 release candidate 1 a while ago:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207612

Unfortunately I don't have time to investigate it further and to try new branch nightlies at the moment. Could others try to reproduce it?

#4 Re: Crash bug reproducable

by motobass

Tuesday June 10th, 2003 1:50 PM

I can't reproduce your bug on Windows 2000 using: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030610

#8 RedHat RPMs

by pchown

Wednesday June 11th, 2003 3:40 AM

I was just wondering why there aren't RedHat RPMs for the release candidates, or any of the other recent releases (eg 1.3.1). You'd probably get a lot more testing of the release candidates if there were RPMs. Also it would be an opportunity to test the packaging. In the past there have occasionally been problems with the RPMs specifically and not the underlying Mozilla code.

#9 Re: RedHat RPMs

by asa

Wednesday June 11th, 2003 3:58 PM

RPMs are contributed builds just like the ports and localized builds. If the guy making the RPM builds (blizzard) has the time and the desire to do so, he will.

--Asa

#10 RedHat RPMs ...

by kdriedge

Wednesday June 11th, 2003 6:22 PM

Why isn't the rpms part of the makefile for Mozilla then it would be just one command away from done each time? Hmmm, maybe it's time for me to do something?

#12 Re: RedHat RPMs

by james

Wednesday June 11th, 2003 7:57 PM

It looks like there are some gtk-2.x builds of 1.4rc1 available as RPMS: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/experimental/gtk2/1.4rc1/

Hope this helps.

#14 Re: RedHat RPMs

by pchown

Thursday June 12th, 2003 4:41 AM

Looks good, I'll try them later. If the person who did the packaging is reading this: thank you.