June 10th The Target For 2.8

In the WordPress Developers channel on IRC today, Ryan Boren announced that the target date for the release of WordPress 2.8 is June 10th. There are a couple other things that were announced as well:

• WP 2.9 will require MySQL 4.1.2 or greater.  This is raised from the current requirement of 4.0.
• Checks will be added to the automatic upgrader that will prevent upgrading to 2.9 if  MySQL < 4.1.2 is being used.  The upgrader will also issue a notice that suggests asking the host to upgrade MySQL to meet the minimum requirement.
• In order to promote migration to PHP 5, the upgrader will suggest that those running
  PHP 4 switch to PHP 5. A link to a Codex page describing how to switch for various hosts should be provided.
• The new weekly IRC meetup time will be every Wednesday at 9pm UTC.

As an aside, I noticed this thread in the hackers mailing list archive which contained not only a link to the 10,000th ticket to be opened and closed in Trac, but also contained a neat tidbit of trivia.

2.8 is the one with the most tickets opened (815, which if memory serves me well is the first time a milestone passes the 800 line), and more importantly with the most tickets closed (758 and counting).

Usually milestones end their lifetime with a couple dozens (if not a couple hundreds, most often) of unresolved tickets, which are then swept under the rug of the next minor or major version.

But this time, thanks to extensions to the release date (and I’m thinking also the tireless participation of external developers, among which one of the most notable is Denis de Bernardy, who devoted himself full-time to tickets-resolving ever since the 24-hour-marathon (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9758#comment:10), we’ve seen a steady decrease in number of open tickets, even thought this major release has seen more open tickets than any other previous release: we’re at 758 closed tickets already, and the closest to that is v2.5 with 750 closed tickets, then v2.7 with 668 closed tickets.

If you continue reading into that archived post, you’ll see that based on Xavier’s opinion, going six months without a major release proved beneficial to getting the ticket situation under control. Hopefully with 2.9 and beyond, the core devs and contributors can keep pace with the progress they have made with 2.8. I’d also like to extend Xavier’s thanks to the core developers, external developers, reviewers, testers, and people who participate in in-depth discussions to figure out the best way to solve a particular problem.