Heptapod 0.15.0 released, featuring GitLab 13.1
We're glad to announce the final release of Heptapod 0.15.0, based on GitLab 13.1, which should get security updates until September 22th, 2020. This version makes also a nice ground for further Heptapod development.
Many thanks to all the people involved!
This is a major GitLab version change: please don't migrate directly from Heptapod<0.14. There are instructions in the changelog to follow.
There is no change in Python version support in this release: Python 3 is the default, Python 2 is still supported.
Heptapod 0.15.0 can be installed as a Docker image and from source.
The current Heptapod Runner 0.3 works with Heptapod 0.15. We'll make a new version 0.4, based on GitLab Runner 13.1 with a release candidate in the next few days.
The full changelog is available alongside the sources.
These two last releases 0.14 and 0.15, have been mostly about climbing the upstream versions ladder, and our policy dictates that we issue a new version 0.x.0 at least each time the upstream GitLab major or minor version (y.z) changes. But we now have almost two months to focus on specific Heptapod features, and we are in a good position for that – see Development tools improvements below for more details.
Documentation effort for 0.15.1
Tomorrow (2020-07-31), we'll be hosting the first Heptapod virtual sprint, focusing on documentation and user messages.
The meeting place is the Development channel of our Mattermost chat system.
We'll start at 11:00 UTC+2 with a short discussion to define the goals and in particular how we'd like Heptapod specific documentation to be organized for easy discoverability. We'll end around 20:00 UTC+2.
People are naturally welcome to connect at any time and stay after the end: we're well aware that time zones can make things complicated. If you want to participate but can't make it at the beginning because it's 2 AM or 10 PM in your time zone, just chime in when you can. Also, if there's enough interested contributors in time zones that are far from CET/CEST, we'll consider making one of the next virtual sprints at a more suitable time to them.
It's possible that 0.15.1 may be released very soon afterwards, with documentation changes only.
Security updates
In the previous announcement for Heptapod 0.14.0 we were saying that we would start applying security updates from upstream GitLab.
This happened in practice, with the release of Heptapod 0.14.1, whose only change was to move from GitLab CE 12.10.11 to 12.10.14, the last of the 12.10 versions.
We'll do our best in the future to follow upstream updates as soon as possible (note that some of them involve the Enterprise Edition only). It's unlikely we'll make such a formal annoucement for each intermediate release: a good way to stay posted is to follow us on our social media channels.
Development tools improvements
Some very important intermediate goals have been achieved while we were working on Heptapod 0.15:
- we now have an official development kit
- we layed down foundations for writing Heptapod integration tests in the Web application and had our CI system run them
- the HGitaly component is available in these integration tests. This will be the cornerstone of its integration with the web application, which is pretty much the long awaited native Mercurial mode.
In other words, Heptapod is more ready than ever to welcome contributions.
A separate blog post may provide more details about all of this.