2.5.3 coming soon--I promise!

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date and not representative. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

The Miro 2.5 series has been a total pain in the ass--I'm not going to lie. Not only has it infuriated a number of users, but it's been like a Sysaphusian struggle for the team.

Right now there are 3 developers (Ben, Luc and myself) and 1 QA person (Janet) that work on Miro fulltime. Then we have a large community of testers, translators, and a handful of people who send in patches to fix the problems that irk them most. Even with this large community, the majority of the development, testing and support is done by 4 people.

In the last three months, Janet's house was hit by lightning frying a bunch of her testing machines; I bought a house and moved (along with the build boxes); Ben went on vacation for a month; Luc bought an apartment, moved, and then had his Internet connection totally hosed for a month; I had unforeseen medical problems (that I don't really want to talk about), that resulted in me being offline for the last two weeks; and our ssl certificates expired.

This week is the first time since the beginning of August when we've had all 4 of us working.

We've been trying so hard to get a much-needed 2.5.3 release out. It has a slew of fixes that should alleviate an array of problems that users have been experiencing. We're finally on the verge of the release. I hope it'll happen today or tomorrow.

I really appreciate the patience many of you have had with us as we scrambled to do the impossible over the last couple of months. I really wish it could have happened differently, but it's as if the forces of nature were completely against us.

Though 2.5.3 should fix a variety of issues, we're working on re-architecting some portions of Miro that aren't working well with the database changes we made in Miro 2.5. On top of that, we're working on subtitle support, extensions, and continuing to make Miro a better experience for a larger group of people. Some/most/all of this will show up in Miro 2.6 and 2.7, hopefully in the next few months.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.