OpenRefine 3.9 release schedule & contents

We'd nominally like to have OpenRefine 3.9 released in October, given that 3.8 was released at the end of April and we're targeting a 6 month cadence. I had hoped to have the release process underway by now, but life has intervened. I'll be travelling for the next couple of weeks with, perhaps, intermittent connectivity, so I'm going to target releasing an initial beta the second week of October and hope to have the final release out about a month later in mid-November. This is perhaps optimistic given that the 3.8 beta process took two months, but we'll use it as a target for now.

I've started populating the 3.9 milestone on Github. Please feel free to suggest modifications (additions or subtractions) to that list of issues, particularly if you have work in progress that you think is close enough to complete to include.

Best regards,
Tom

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Hi @tfmorris,

I'd like to propose to take care of this release, that is to say to be release manager again, so that we can release 3.9 soon. If you are able to find time for OpenRefine in the coming weeks and months, I think it would be better spent by reviewing candidates to the developer position and by reviewing my PRs on the reproducibility project. In comparison, making a release is a formal process which doesn't need much expertise, and it feels quite urgent to me to get it out of the door, given the many changes we have accumulated on the master branch.

Unless there are any concerns with this plan, I would cut a 3.9-beta1 from the master branch in a week.

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A week has passed, so I have started on releasing 3.9-beta1.
When composing the change log I have noticed that we have a known bug, that would be worth addressing before 3.9-beta1, so I have opened a PR for it:

@antonin_d,

Last December, I prepared a video walkthrough of the changes for the Wikimedia Commons "Train the Trainer" group. We are also planning to create a post on Wikimedia Meta to present the release.

Since the recording, I have noticed a few additions to the release, specifically:

Are there any other new features or major changes planned for this release? In order to coordinate the publication of our post and the 3.9 release, do you have a timeline in mind?

thanks

Since we have already published the 3.9-beta1, I wouldn't add any other major feature to the release.

We haven't got so much feedback about the 3.9-beta1 version, either because it's not so buggy or because not many people have been using it. Perhaps the column resizing feature could be improved on Safari and Edge, but I'm not sure how involved that is.

As far as I am concerned, I'm happy to publish 3.9.0 any time soon, I am not aware of any blocker.

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For the record here is the recording of the walkthrough of 3.9.

I am looking for a better platform than Zoom to host it. Currently, OpenRefine does not have an account on a popular video hosting platform; the closest option we may have is Google Drive.

The alternative for YouTube is uploading to Wikimedia Commons? Ex. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?type=video&title=Special:MediaSearch&search=openrefine

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I propose releasing 3.9.0 next week. Perhaps I have the time to get in an improvement of column resizing on Edge / Safari. Let me know if anything else needs fixing before this stable release.

I wasn't able to reproduce the column resizing bug on Edge so far and @thadguidry also didn't.
I also tried it in Konqueror (which has the same web engine as Safari, WebKit) and couldn't notice any issues (although a contributor stated that they did find some on Safari).

I have added a tweak to the Windows installer after noticing issues with leftover files from a previous install: fix: Windows installer removes previous install by wetneb ยท Pull Request #7123 ยท OpenRefine/OpenRefine ยท GitHub

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The recording is now available on Wikimedia Commons for wider sharing

@Alicia_Fagerving let me know if the upload works for you.

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