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Getting Very Close to MIB Smithy SDK 4.0 Release

It’s been a very, very long time coming, due to the scope of architecture changes and QA testing required (along with numerous distractions along the way, including the pain of maintaining to very diverging branches of code), but I’m so close to finally releasing MIB Smithy SDK 4.0. I had told a few people that I was trying hard to get it out by the end of 2009, which obviously has passed. But there’s a bit more I’m trying to squeeze into the release (to make it more worthy of a major version number) and tiny bit more QA test automation to do for one of the feature changes.

As I write this, I have 16 open feature and 7 open bug cases in FogBugz currently targeted for 4.0, which is down from and 31 features and 13 bugs a week ago, to give you an idea how close it is and how much progress is being made.

My focus for these last cases is primarily clarifying some existing MIB/PIB validation messages, adding more validation routines where gaps in coverage were uncovered during the big QA test automation push (which involved hard core analysis of old vs. new code and revisiting the standards documents), and closing nearly all of the known bugs in the SDK. The latter is particularly important to me in getting to where I can make it policy aim for each release to be “known bug free”.

At this point there are only 10 total remaining bug cases, and the three not targeted for 4.0 are so minor or obscure as to not matter for now: one of them, for example, is about comments just before macros not being preserved by the parser because we skip over (but don’t preserve) the macros themselves. Well, macros are only defined in the SMI base modules, which don’t change, so it’s a stretch to call it a bug and there’s no reason hold 4.0 any longer for it.

With the 4.0 release so close I can almost taste it, I feel a bit more comfortable talking about it, and you may have noticed I’ve also been sprucing up the Muonics web site a fair bit in preparation. I’ll be back later today or tomorrow with a little preview of MIB Smithy SDK 4.0.

PS: I set up a new twitter account for another way to follow the goings on at Muonics. If I set things up correctly, this post should show up as the first tweet automatically.