[gmx-developers] Second beta release of GROMACS 2020

[Paul bauer]

Hello developers,

I just uploaded the second beta release of GROMACS 2020, with the fixes 
for the
issues found be us and you during the first beta 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 got shipped quite a lot later than I promised in the 
last mail,
so please accept my apologies for the delay.

Especially, we would like to have tests for:
The new GPU code paths under different simulation conditions
Testing of the density fitting code
Checks that the modular simulator performs as expected
Some user experience with the Python API

The release-2020 branch will be created shortly, and will then be 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.

I'm planning to ship another beta in about two weeks time to give you 
enough time
for testing the code and to tell us if there are any issues with it that 
should be fixed before
a release candidate later in December. 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.

As mentioned before, any bugs found in release-2019 should continue to be
targeted at this version, before we move it to essential fixes only 
after 2020 gets
released next year. At the same time we will retire the release-2018 
branch with
a final patch version. The release-2019 branch will stay open for about 
a year for
fixes that prevent wrong science, and will be closed around the time of 
GROMACS 2021.
Fixes in it will be appear in release-2020 branch via merges or by 
cherry-picking changes in the usual way.

Happy coding

-- 
Paul Bauer, PhD
GROMACS Release Manager
KTH Stockholm, SciLifeLab
0046737308594