I fully understand and appreciate that the phpBB development team are all volunteers and phpBB releases are made when they are ready.
Since all indication are that the
phpBB Release, Security and Support Plan seems to have become obsolete (abandoned), I'm trying to read the tea leaves as it were to get a sense of what to expect for the phpBB 3.3 release stream so that I can have a rough plan of when to expect when work items on my site.
Again, I cannot say it enough, I fully understand and appreciate that the phpBB development team are all volunteers and phpBB releases are made when they are ready.
That said, if I use the phpBB 3.2 experience as a timeline guide I come up with:
That last announcement (pre COVID-19) stated
Marc wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2020 11:53 am
As phpBB 3.3 provides a clear update path with minimal breaking changes, phpBB 3.2 will directly enter a reduced maintenance mode during which it will only receive changes for major issues as well as any security issues. The timetable for maintenance and security fixes is as follows:
- End of Maintenance (EOM): April 6th, 2020
- End of Life (EOL): July 6th, 2020
Having reported a few bugs in the tracker and watching activity is seems that there is solid evidence that there will be a phpBB 3.2.10.
Two questions arise. First question, has the phpBB 3.2.x EOM and EOL timeline changed?
Second question, can board admins expect that phpBB 3.3.x releases have a high likelihood of following the rough timeline of phpBB 3.2 and therefore that phpBB 3.3.1 likely won't appear until summer time?
My background is software development, so I'm not looking for anyone to go out on a limb and commit to a detailed schedule. I'm more looking for a high level view, i.e. quarterly releases are intended, so that I can plan ahead rather than react when releases are made.
I've made the occasional code contribution to phpBB and checked
Get Involved and couldn't find anything about potentially helping out of the QA side of things if that would help improve the timeframe to get releases out the door. I do check
[3.x] Discussion - Development Discussion Board to see if Release Candidates are available and try to test them and provide feedback whenever possible.
Normal people… believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet. – Scott Adams