Subversion 1.2 status report.

A lot of people have been asking when SVN 1.2 will be released.

My best guess for a subversion-1.2.0-beta1 release date is early February 2005. A beta release is not the same as a stable release, of course, but the point is to get a tarball out there that people can test.

This is not some sort of official position. If the developer community has an official position at all, it's probably something like "When it's ready." But that doesn't mean 1.2 is floating in complete limbo either. We are making good progress, and February seems like a realistic estimate for the first beta.

The big new feature in 1.2 will be locking ("reserved checkouts"). Starting with 1.2.0-beta1, we will put out successive beta releases until the code is stable enough to start the "soak period" for the real 1.2.0 release. The soak period normally lasts about a month. There are various procedures for deciding which bugfixes require a restart of the soak and which don't. I won't go into the details here; read http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/HACKING if you're interested.

The locking code is about 50%-60% done, and is going along well. Also, there have been many, many bugfixes and enhancements since 1.1. But if you look in the issue tracker, you will still see many open bugs slated to be fixed in 1.2. IMHO we shouldn't hold up 1.2 on those remaining issues. That is, once locking is ready, we should go with what we have, and move still-open bugs into 1.3 and 1.4. (This isn't as bad as it sounds. We loaded up 1.2 with a lot of issues, knowing that we might have to defer some of them, because we didn't know how long locking would take. Now we have a better idea.)

In other news:

Subversion 1.1.2 (a bugfix release in the 1.1 series) will come out very soon. We're hoping to wrap it up in the next week or two. It will contain many bugfixes; in fact, quite a few of the 1.2 bugfixes have been backported to 1.1.2. We haven't written the CHANGES summary for 1.1.2 yet, but it will be in the announcement.

Hope all this helps,
-Karl