I have been visiting the area51 phpBB forum for some time now, and in particular, I have been visiting the “Suspecting RC1 Soon…” thread. First time I saw that thread was a few pages in and the quoted date of the first post was January 6 2007. Whilst I knew it was unrealistic that a Release Candidate was going to be released before another BETA I still kept reading the topic just to see what, if any Olympus developers would comment back. It was confirmed by dhn that infact that beta 5 would be next. Once Sun Jan 28 was hit (the date of Beta5 was released) I started visiting more and more because of the excitement that a Release Candidate would bring. At this point, it could have been seen that a Release Candidate was coming - and fast. But we were wrong as here we are on 17 May 2007 still with beta 5.

Dont get me wrong - I perfectly agree with beta testing and pushing the source code to its full potential, but I have to say, that some of the bug reports that are being put through the bug trucker simply slow the process down even more. As far as I am aware (and I have been developing code for a few years now) that a bug is a fault in the code that prevents the program from performing its task. If you are thinking about reporting a bug - you have the full right to do so - but think - is this really a bug that is stopping Olympus from performing its programmed task? If you are unsure, talk to a friend and see what they think. Bugs that should be reported for a beta product should be those that the system is designed to process but doesnt or the system executes unintended behaviour.

However, the month of May has been promising for a Release Candidate client. The bug tracker looks promising and we are seeing constant “review later” bugs because these bugs do not affect for a Release Candidate release. You may also want to see a small status update for Olympus which was also posted in the month of May. I believe that around this time period, a Release Candidate should be released. The bugs being reported are very minimal and it looks like people are stuggling to find them - this is promising.

To conclude - I agree 100% with reporting bugs, but not to the extend that I have seen on the bug tracker. Things that you interpret differently because of language entries are not bugs - you can always change it yourself when you install it on your domain. Here’s to the future of phpBB and you can be sure that I shall be installing it on this domain!

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