Hi guys,
As a french member of the modelers community, (I did work on A-10, f-14b, A-6, KNUQ, KLSV, and the Vinson) I'm quite surprised about how things here are moving to a sad story.
I wouldn't dive in the details but I would rather emphasis on the essential points.
Flightgear developers and modelers (users too) did wait for a long-long time for people having enough skills and having the possibility to give a huge quantity of work time concentrated in a short period, so they can handle a new release process. A new release process was necessary, the software and the environment (people, technical resources like versioning system) did change over time. In the same time those people established a road map so FG has 2 release a year instead of 1 release every 2 years. This is a huge improvement and maybe the best improvement for the project since a long time.
Now that the release process has been publicly discussed on the devel list and widely accepted by the community, we, modelers have to see how we can help, together, so the release get finished with efficiency. At that time everybody should concentrate on the success of the project as a whole.
People here, know me has a slow contributor, and as such it took me time to understand how deeply important and how complex is a release process. So I'm not surprised when people, trully involved in a big and nice aircraft project can be sad when they discover that they missed the deadline, meanly because of poor team coordination. But the time line was at least discussed on the devel list which is the most important thing to read when contributing.
That's said, waiting for 17th July is not a big deal, there was no offense from the FG release team, nor from the commiters, and users will benefit from a better organization and more frequent releases. Our own aircraft projects, like my Hawkeye or the next f-14b radar feature can wait, on the other hand, everyone did wait a too long time for a consistent release process.
About the technical details explained on the other thread:
http://flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12423&p=129864#p129864, well, here in France we use to say, "there ain't be any problems, there are only solutions"
Keep on the good work,
Alexis