Release Date Prediction?

[legoboyvdlp]

So, when do you predict this will come out? I think it may be about the end of October.

[patstan]

I think it might take another good few months to complete. The flightgear project has slowed down a little bit.

[Hooray]

it depends, it could very well just take a few more weeks - the main factor here is the degree of feedback provided by end-users, as well involvement from experienced contributors who can provide backtraces and "actionable" bug reports to help track down remaining issues.

Things haven't necessarily slowed down recently, it's just that the number of people who can actually fix these issues is fairly low due to the code that is affected by this particular bug, i.e. the rendering code (OSG) and the FlightGear integration layer dealing with shaders and effects, which is a multi-threaded component, i.e. code that may be concurrently executed on different CPU cores.

The person who wrote that code is currently not involved in the project and didn't document the code in question - the person who identified the bug doesn't typically do OSG/rendering related development, and has has asked Stuart is to handle development/bug fixing here, because he's familiar with this code as he used it for implementing random trees/buildings.
However, Stuart happens to be the one who would normally ask the very person who came up with the effects/shader code (Tim Moore) to review his additions, too - so this is indeed a chicken/egg problem to some degree, and it isn't easily fixed. The more people can help with testing, and maybe even making good bug reports, the more likely an imminent release might be.

Overall, I wouldn't worry too much though - while this is a fairly serious bug, we have seen a number of similarly critical bugs shipped in previous release cycles that only ended up being fixed months later - so people could just as well call it a day and postpone fixing this to get the release out - this one certainly isn't the first (or the last) segfault to be identified in FlightGear after all - the only reason why the release hasn't been shipped yet is that two core developers have offered their time and expertise to help with fixing this - but otherwise, 3.2 might already be out - just like 3.0 contained a pretty serious bug that could easily crash FG.

In summary, if you truly care about getting the latest "and greatest" release, please consider building from source, which will also allow you to do a lot of testing and provide bug reports, so that future releases will hopefully contain fewer bugs, and so that serious bugs don't go unnoticed for months, or even years.

[legoboyvdlp]

Thanks, and I will try and download it as soon as possible.