New 2.12.x stable release

[kimmov]

I've already written about this to mailing lists but good to post here also.

I've said multiple times that there won't be more 2.12.x stable releases. And the reasons were good, like not having the VS2003 compiler anymore.

But due to the DLL injection vulnerability we have no other change than make a new release. Otherwise we'd leave lots of users vulnerable. And WinMerge is even listed as vulnerable application by Secunia.

But this means that next 2.12.x stable release is much more than just fix for that vulnerability. There will be compiler and runtime update to VS 2008, translation updates, couple of new translations, some bug fixes etc. This is way more than we have used to have in "late" bug fix releases and I'm not really happy to do this - more changes means bigger risk of something breaking also.

Since we are going to add more changes now, I'm also interested in fixing some bugs we have fixed in trunk meanwhile. So if you want some fix to appear in next stable release also, please comment on the bug/patch item, and preferably also here so I don't miss it. Fix must still be low risk fix and I'm not considering any complex rewrites or refactorings to stable release. But if we can make stable release a bit more stable and better release then we should do it.

Because there will be so many changes I probably will be releasing a new beta release from the stable branch before actual stable release. To get some more public testing. I hope we can make the stable release to happen within few weeks.

[christianlist]

It looks to me like we have the things we want for the next stable release in the 2.14.* branch now.
Is there any patches we are still missing, or can we go on with the release?

[kimmov]

I haven't had a time to look at the changes in 2.13.x. I hoped somebody has time to do even cursory look of patches we could add. Tim has ported some patched and Jochen did port few. But certainly there are more fixes we need to take. Looking through the changelog file should be a pretty good starting point as all important fixed and changes should be listed in it.

For example Matthias' Unicode fixes are something to consider. They aren't all low-risk but they also fix real bugs people have run into.

[gerundt]

What do we with PCRE and SCEW? Can we update it without problems?

Trunk use PCRE 8.10 and SCEW 1.1.2. Branch R2_14 use PCRE 7.8 and SCEW 0.4.0.

[kimmov]

What do we with PCRE and SCEW? Can we update it without problems?

Yes, we should update those. Updating is not trivial and takes some time and effort. One can check the diffs from trunk to get an idea how it went last time. I don't have extra time this week for WinMerge work but I hope I have some time next week...

[kimmov]

One tricky part with updating PCRE and SCEW are different VS versions of project files. So you can't just copy files over from trunk to 2.14 branch.

I guess it would make things easier if we update also 2.14 branch project files to VS 2005 format...

[kimmov]

Ok, very quick look to changelog for new features/changes (so I'm still missing lots of stuff) and some comments:

• New options page for Shell Integration options (#2433648) - should port as it makes Options GUI clearer
• Better Unicode file detection for full contents compare (#2477657) - need to look through but probably should port
• Detect Windows 7 and Windows 2008 in config log (#2599256) - should port
• Show only "Copy to other side" item in file compare context menu (#2600787) - should port
• Add option for setting line difference wordbreak characters (#2655563) - perhaps, depending if we port also Matthias' other word/char diff highlight patches. I'm not sure if this useful without those?
• Add menuitems for selecting automatic or manual prediffing (#2638608) - plugin users appreciate this
• Remember last target folder for Copy/Move to in folder compare (#2659228) - should port
• Initialize folder selection dialog to currently selected folder in options dialog (r6570) - should port
• Expand/collapse folders from keyboard (#2203904) - should port
• Disable folder compare tree-view by default (#2714968) - should port
• Allow setting codepage from command line (#2725549) - should port
• Improve detecting XML files in file compare (#2726531) - should port
• Improve startup time (#2788142) - should port
• Create config log file to My Documents-folder (#2789839) - should port
• Installer: Don't set -x for TSVN command line (#2791093) - should port
• Move translations to own folder - This was more of SVN repository reorganization and doesn't seem to be worth of the trouble doing in branch
• Allow editing context line count in patch creator (#2092180) - should port
• PCRE and Expat updates - should port as already mentioned in previous posts
• Improve color options organization (#2818451) - should port
• Add new options dialog panel for folder compare options (#2819626) - should port
• Allow disabling reading of unique folder contents (#2820067) - might make sense to port?
• Add options GUI for quick compare limit (#2825628) - should port
• Add accelerator keys for Shell context menu (#2823536) - should port
• Add /xq command line switch for closing WinMerge after identical files and not showing message (#2827836) - should port, people may already be depending on this switch
• Updating VS project files to VS2005 - probably, would make some other things easier (like porting SCEW and PCRE)
• Write config log as UTF-8 file (r7057) - should port
• Improve editing of linefilter regular expressions (#3015416) - should port
• Make comment filtering work for folder compare (#3046938) - need to consider
• Allow giving encoding name as custom codepage (#2813825, #3010934) - should port

Some of these might already be in 2.12/2.14.

And as is obvious from the list I really selected most of the new stuff we have in 2.13/2.14. Most of the them are real improvements and I don't see a reason to not release them. Especially if 2.14.x will be our last 2.x stable release.

[gerundt]

Should we maybe add a Wiki page for this? In this case we could easier mark the things, which we already backport.

[kimmov]

Should we maybe add a Wiki page for this? In this case we could easier mark the things, which we already backport.

Good idea - would make tracking and editing the list much easier.

I still must emphasize that this list was my initial list by reading through our changelog file. There might be items that are already in 2.12/2.14. And while most should be pretty straightforward porting wort there might be dependencies to patches preventing sensible porting etc. And of course all the bug fixes are missing! Since I have no idea which bugs are present in 2.12/2.14 and which are not - need to read through bug reports and/or test...

But anyway there should be plenty of easy to port patches to get started with the porting work.

[gerundt]

Ok, I create a rough Wiki page for this: http://winmerge.org/Wiki/R2_14