FusionForge 5.0 released

Fourteen months after the renaming of the Free/Open Source code of
GForge 4.x to the new "FusionForge" name, we're pleased to announce
version 5.0. As mentioned in the release notes, this is still an
incremental step over version 4.8 rather than a revolution, but the
changes are important enough, and numerous enough, that we felt it
justified to bump the major version number.

Major improvements, beyond a host of bugfixes, include:
- a rewrite of the version control integration (with support for Bazaar,
  Darcs, Git and Mercurial in addition to the "traditional" CVS and
  Subversion); 
- a much better integration of Mediawiki (one wiki, with its own set of
  permissions, per project);
- a cleaner database layer, more robust against SQL injections;
- configurable display for the trackers;
- more powerful tracker engine, with configurable workflows;
- a rework of the default theme, with better accessibility.

FusionForge 5.0 now also includes new plugins that were previously only
"floating around" (or completely private):
- projectlabels gives a simple way of adding bits of HTML onto project
  description pages, so the forge admin can, for instance, highlight a
  "project of the month";
- extratabs allows a project to define new tabs in its pages, pointing
  at external resources;
- globalsearch is a first step in the "federation of forges" concept,
  whereby a project search can be conducted on several forges at once;
- contribtracker allows a forge to prominently display major
  contributors to projects, to give them visibility beyond the simple
  commit logs.

These plugins, as well as a large part of the improvements in the
trackers and the rewritten Mediawiki plugin, are a direct consequence of
the "upstreaming" of work having been done in private instances of
forges. We're happy to note that this goal of ours (to merge local
patches into the central repository when it makes sense) seems to be
working well. For the record, this 5.0 release includes work and plugins
that were reintegrated from sources such as Alcatel-Lucent, Adullact and
AdaCore.

This release is also the first to have had the benefit of automated
testing during the whole cycle. Coverage isn't 100 % yet, but the
existing unit tests and functional tests help us be confident in the
quality of the release. We'll keep adding more tests as time passes, of
course.

Looking back at the initial goals stated when the project started, we
seem to be on the right track:
- stable release pushed out: check (this is the third one, not counting
  minor releases);
- new plugins merged: check;
- automated testing: check;
- external contributions merged: check;
- explicit governance model and release process: sort-of (there's still
  a cabal, but it's partially documented).

We still need to work on the database schema and the cross-distro part,
as well as cross-forge interoperability. The good news is that work is
happening on these fronts already. And with almost 2500 commits, we
truly seem to have accomplished at least one of the (implicit) goals: to
bring development back to a healthy state. And we're far from being out
of ideas for the future, so there's a lot of good stuff still cooking!

Roland,
on behalf of the FusionForge hackers.
-- 
Roland Mas

We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code. -- IETF