[gmx-developers] Third beta release of GROMACS 2019

[Paul bauer]

Hello developers,

I just uploaded the third beta release of GROMACS 2019, with the fixes 
for the
issues found be us and you during the previous beta versions now mostly 
fixed. The plan is still
to ship the new release at the beginning of the new year, so please 
continue to
help us dogfood things by building the code on your local machines and 
trying out your favourite
simulations - we can not test everything ourself here and appreciate 
your help in
identifying and fixing remaining issues in the code!

I know the version again got shipped a bit later than I promised in the 
last mail,
so please accept my apologies for the delay (I hope that the final 
release won't be delayed :) ).

Especially, we would like to have tests for:
Different kinds of accelerators tested for the OpenCL support
Tests of simulations for proper use of the update groups

The release-2019 branch is now (mostly) frozen for new code submissions,
and we are planning to only have bug fixing going on in this branch from 
now on.
Any major code changes can continue on master, and we are planning to merge
any changes from the release branches back into it by the usual merge 
commits.

The plan is now to have the release candidate out on December 07. This 
is a tentative target,
because we don't know how many more issues will crop up now.
If you need to have your fix in before this, 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.

As mentioned before, any bugs found in release-2018 should continue to be
targeted at this version, before we move it to essential fixes only 
after 2019 gets
released next year. At the same time we will retire the release-2016 
branch with
a final patch version. The release-2018 branch will stay open for about 
a year for
fixes that prevent wrong science, and will be closed around the time of 
GROMACS 2020.
We are planning to change the guidelines for porting fixes to older 
release branches,
so stay tuned for the announcement there.

Happy coding

Paul Bauer
GROMACS release manager