By the time M3 will come out finally, it will have been five months since the last proper release. Time flies when you’re having fun! In all seriousness, that’s far too long, and we did bite off a bit more than we could easily chew. Ho hum.

The first test release for M3 is out there, though. I was going to call these release candidates, but I decided against it – there’s no way the first few will be released, so they’re not really RCs.

It would be great if people can test this a good amount. I have a reasonable idea of what most of the worst bugs are, and I really want us to get to the stage where people can seriously use Bongo for everyday stuff, so that’s mostly what I’m aimed at. Read the unfinished release notes, and then grab the tarball.

I was thinking about naming the people who have helped contribute to this release, but honestly, there’s way too many – which is great. Our last release was around 300 revisions ago, and so much has changed then, and there’s still another branch to merge into this release. I do think we need to have a much better list of contributors on the web site though, because I think people should get recognition for the input they put in.

I’ll allow myself to be distracted by M4 a little bit: I really want a quick M4 release this time around, so although we want to re-work our web UI, M4 might not get it – maybe just the new Flasher UI and get Hawkeye into almost final shape. Our mail stuff should be much closer to being done, and the command line tools also. Maybe we should move to time-based releases already, to focus the mind?