Hello fashrom community,
Great news! As subject says: first release candidate for 1.3 is tagged as v1.3.0-rc1
The main thing that will be happening with RC1 now is testing.
Few notes about testing and/or using flashrom built from v1.3.0-rc1.
If you are a flashrom user who has never built flashrom from source code, and always used a packaged release version, please continue doing so for now. Release candidate is not a release yet, it is possible some bugs will be found in RC1 and we will have RC2 to fix those. Watch the mailing list for further announcements.
If you are a developer and building flashrom from source is an acceptable level of risk for you (because you've done that before, tried new features from head before, have been developing / testing your own patches, or tried / tested patches from other people in community), then please feel free to use v1.3.0-rc1.
Your help with testing and reporting bugs is highly appreciated! No test case is too small: even if you can run one specific scenario, it is an important contribution, and yes it helps!
A special case of the above: if you are a developer and work in a company that is using flashrom: if you could contribute to testing v1.3.0-rc1 that would be really great! Perhaps (that's me "thinking aloud") it is possible to point an automated tests suite to v1.3.0-rc1 and run the tests?
How to report a bug or successful testing: there are few options. First option is to post on the mailing list (feel free to reply on this thread, or create a new thread). Second option is to add a comment to a ticket "Testing for release v1.3" https://ticket.coreboot.org/issues/378. This would require an account in bugtracker (coreboot account is fine). Thirdly, of course, you can fix a bug and send a patch! :) Please set a topic "for_1.3.x"
And finally, What's new since 1.2? We've done ~1000 commits in ~3 years! The full exact list of "what's new" is under construction, will be ready later :)
Meanwhile, here is a very high-level unordered overview:
meson support expanded, and documentation is added build systems improvements, for both of them new programmers added new chips added unit tests misc cleanups / refactorings removing global state / fixing memory leaks write-protect and write-protect emulation in dummyflasher MAINTAINERS file build script for jenkins upgraded flashrom_tester improvements manpage grew more info ...
Two features dropped from release: promontory support displaying progress in libflashrom operations Due to the bugs that won't be possible to fix/test in time for 1.3. Bug-fixes are planned for the release after (1.3+1).
Thanks heaps everyone, for testing, using flashrom, and supporting the release process in any other way! It is so much appreciated. Happy holidays to everyone!