Wesnoth 1.10 Release Candidate 1, oh my!

January 08, 2012

Hi! I’m shadowmaster. You might remember me from such type of campaigns as Invasion from the Unknown, After the Storm and Flesh and Steel (tentative name). As some of you may have heard, Wesnoth 1.10 RC 1 has been tagged in the mainline Subversion repository today, marking the start of the final stretch before the final (but by no means definitive) release of Wesnoth 1.10, the new stable series for this year.

If you are interested in the changelogs, they can be found at the following two locations:

Players changelog (shorter, always incomplete)
Full changelog (longer, harder to read, less incomplete)

In general, after a development (odd Y number in X.Y.Z) release is tagged in SVN, 24 hours must pass before it is announced, in case the primary packagers (Pandora, Windows, Mac OS X and Debian) detect critical bugs that could require immediate fixing, and to give them time to catch up since not all of them have a lot of time in their hands or enough resources — at one point, a packager was constantly running out of hard disk space thanks to Wesnoth’s sheer volume.

If you are tech-savvy enough to be able to determine which package is the one that corresponds to your platform—or you just prefer to compile from source—you can skip the wait for the announcement and head directly to the SF.net project files and locate your download. For example, these are the Wesnoth 1.10 RC 1 files; at first there’s only the source code tarball, but more files will appear as the primary packagers finish their work. Of course, during the first few hours, not all SF.net mirrors will be able to provide the files. Again, Wesnoth is very large and takes a while to transfer over the net.

(Wesnoth 1.10 RC 1 internally calls itself 1.9.14. This is intentional.)

With the first Release Candidate for 1.10 tagged and later announced, all commits in SVN trunk from now on will be only fixes for bugs reported in the bug tracker following our instructions, and translation updates, until 1.10.0 is ready. If too many major and complicated bugs come up, 1.10 RC 2 will be released before 1.10, but that seems unlikely right now since the release manager has a plan.

I have an announcement to make in the forums tomorrow that is strongly related to Wesnoth 1.10 and may upset the Crazy MP People a bit since I’ll be ~~encouraging~~ forcing them to test 1.10 RC 1 like the Crazy MP People they are. We shall see.