Since 4.0 development has been moving so quickly, we’ve just had everyone pulling the absolute latest source code from Subversion (technically called the “HEAD” revision). This was a good thing during early development because it kept us all on the same page.

However, with 4.0 no longer in beta, we really need to improve this process so people know they’re running the latest stable code and not something we worked on 5 minutes ago, or bleary-eyed at 3AM. Most of the time we’re pretty thorough with our local tests, but they’re no substitute for the acceptance tests and browser-compliance tests Joe@WGM runs in Q/A. You guys have access to our main repository, so there’s no guarantee the absolute latest code has gone through Q/A.

Our philosophy with 4.0 has been to *not* make a big deal about point releases in an attempt to discourage ourselves from batching up functionality and fixes to make a “marketable release”. We want to give you real-time access to the fixes and features that you care about. Those of you who need a specific feature (or want to help test) can upgrade 5 minutes after we commit changes. Everyone else can be confident we’ve fully tested the incremental upgrade they’re going through.

It’s not that we haven’t been testing things carefully all along, but we haven’t been very good about telling you after we run all our tests.

So here’s what we’re going to do:

• Every other Monday we’re going to make a new milestone build that will go through Joe@WGM’s entire acceptance and browser test suite. Anything that fails will go back to development as a top priority. This is pretty much how things work now anyway, but it leads into:
• Once the acceptance tests all pass, we’ll update the latest “stable” build on our on-line demos, instant evaluations, hosted helpdesks and the downloadable ZIP file.
• If you run Cerb4 on your own server, you can upgrade by simply issuing the command “svn -r nnn update” from your /cerb4 directory at the server console (where ‘nnn’ is the version number posted on the site). In Windows you can use TortoiseSVN to “Update to Revision” by right clicking the cerb4 folder in Explorer.

Thanks for being enthusiastic enough about the project that this is even an issue!