[gmx-developers] plans for beta phase

[Mark Abraham]

Hi developers,

As you've probably seen, we've made the first beta release of GROMACS 2018,
which we plan to ship before the new year. Please do help us dogfood things
by building the code on your local machines and trying out your favourite
simulations - the core developers test a lot of things, but we need people
to try things that are our outside of our brain space, too!

We'll be making a TODO list for things we want to have done to test the
code before we make the final release, so watch this space.

I've just made the release-2018 branches in both the source and
regressiontests repositories. Those are open for general bug fixing. If
there's patches currently on master branch that should go into the 2018
release, please cherry pick them across (e.g. using the nice button Gerrit
provides). Shortly, I will make the Jenkins jobs that verify the 2018
branch, also. Fixes made on release-2018 will show up in master branch via
a merge commit in the usual way.

We will make updated beta releases weekly based on whatever is currently on
the HEAD of release-2018. If you want a bug fix to be in the next beta,
please help organize to get the fix made and reviewed. The role of the
release manager is to ship code that's in good shape, not to shepherd every
known issue to be resolved before shipping.

I'll ship the next beta on Tues Dec 5, unless we decide there's something
more important we want fixed and out there sooner!

Release-2016 is also open for bug fixing, but effectively immediately it's
moving to mode where we fix in that branch only bugs that a likely to lead
to wrong science. That branch will stay open for about a year for such
fixes, and closed around the time of GROMACS 2019. Fixes in it will be
appear in release-2018 branch via merges in the usual way.

Release-5-1 needs one final release (which I promised a while back), as
there's one significant bug fix that's a bit delayed. I'll do that in a
week or two, just in case we discover things while we're testing now. Then
it will be closed permanently, and the Jenkins configurations archived.

Technically master branch is now back open for general GROMACS work, but
many of the key people will be fully occupied with testing and fixing for
some weeks yet!

Mark
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