Some serious thought is being put into getting a new release of BZFlag out.  Essentially it’s been decided that version 3.0 was too big of a jump with far too many big changes.  We got lost in all of the bugs and features and couldn’t get a release out.  Feature creep from the last five or six years caused us to end up with something we couldn’t easily fix.

Now the plan is to move trunk (2.99.x/3.x.x) out of the way, copy v2_0branch (2.0.x) into trunk, and then relabel the new trunk as 2.3.0.0.  Then we’ll start to bring back specific low-risk features from 2.99.x and put them into 2.3.x, which we’ll release as 2.4.0.0 (or whatever we decide on).  The idea is to push for getting a release out in a month or so.  This will mean there is less time for feature creep to take over again, which in turn will reduce how much testing we have to do.  Less new features = less chance of breaking stuff.

It won’t be BZFlag 3.0, but it will be a new version that has features worth upgrading for.  Here’s a wiki page that we’re working on that covers the plan: http://my.bzflag.org/w/BZFlag_2.3

We’re also going to work on migrating all of the web services (forum, list, wiki, main site, etc) to a different server that will be a bit more … responsive.  The existing server has been less than ideal for a long time and has hit various resource limitations.  It’s not that we’ve outgrown the server, but there is just a couple resource hungry processes (coughirssicough) on the old server that chew up lots of RAM (hundreds of MB) and make everything else very slow.

So, I’ll be working on the migration over the weekend here.  During that time, there might be some temporary outages.