[Pdns-users] New PowerDNS employee, the importance of testing RCs, skipping 3.7.0, World Hosting Days 2015

[bert hubert]

Hi everybody,

Some assorted remarks & PowerDNS news: 

	1) New employee 
	2) Please test our release candidates 
	3) 3.7.0 has been skipped, all hail 3.7.1 
	4) World Hosting days in Germany

New employee
------------
To start with, the great news is that on March 2nd, Pieter Lexis will be
joining PowerDNS as a fulltime employee! 

Pieter wrote a paper and software on DANE under our mentorship while at the
OS3 program at the University of Amsterdam, and later did an amazing job
converting our documentation to the splendor you can now find on
http://doc.powerdns.com/ Based on this work, we offered Pieter a job and
we're very happy he accepted!

Pieter (not to be confused with existing employee Peter) will focus on
helping customers, improving our code & infrastructure, fixing bugs and
working on internet standards relevant for DNS.

Release candidates
------------------
When we work on a PowerDNS release, once we feel that it is ready to be
used, we issue a Release Candidate.  This is something you can run in
production, and we expect it to work fine.  If you have issues with an RC,
we'll jump on them and resolve them as quickly as is possible.  In the 3.7.0
release process this worked well, and because RC1 and RC2 saw wide
deployment, many small issues were found before the actual release.  3.7.0
was looking good, and we tagged it for release.

And then PowerDNS user & packager Ralf van der Enden reported that the 3.7.0
we uploaded did exactly nothing on his FreeBSD system.  After intense
debugging to see if we could save 3.7.0, we found that we indeed had a bug
which meant 3.7.0 compiled on FreeBSD, but did nothing.  This was fixed.

Today, we are increasing our regression tests to run on FreeBSD as well to
prevent a repeat of this. 

But we'd like to urge our users, especially the ones on less mainstream
platforms than Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Red Hat, to test our release
candidates.  This is one of the best ways you, like Ralf did, can help us
deliver quality products!

3.7.0 will be skipped
---------------------
Because we had uploaded 3.7.0 and had it built for our various platforms, we
are not going to slip the FreeBSD fix into 3.7.0 and end up with two
different 3.7.0 releases. The next PowerDNS Recursor release will be 3.7.1.
This release is imminent, after we complete our FreeBSD regression testing.

World Hosting Days 2015 in Rust
-------------------------------
PowerDNS and several of our Certified Consultants will be at World Hosting
Days 2015 in Rust, Germany (March 24-26). As always, we enjoy meeting with
PowerDNS users. If you or your management will be there and want to talk,
please let us know!

Kind regards,

Bert
PowerDNS