Release 1.5.8

[qaisjp]

This is a checklist of things to do, more or less copied from the wiki.

Pre-Release

Code

• Ensure GitHub milestone is emptied, moving over to backlog accordingly
  • As of this comment (30th August) we only have one bug to fix left.
• Revert volatile features/changes
  • I don't think we need to revert anything?
• Make sure all new functions are added to CResourceChecker.Data.h (done in Update CResourceChecker.Data.cpp for 1.5.8's features #1706)
• Make sure CCredits.cpp is up to date (done in Update credits #1703)

News post

• Draft up news article, post on forum
  • @Lpsd has written and posted a great draft
• Go through log (git log 1.5.7...master) and, on the changelog:
  • Note down nice new features
  • Note down nice bugfixes
  • Note down any community contributor (commit authors)
• Go through list of features and do a once over for functionality tests
• Ensure all new functions or changes have been documented on wiki.mtasa.com
• Add highlights to the news post
• Update your forum draft, asking for final feedback
• Await approval of news post

Don't forget to include:

• Resource contributors
  • Lots of new work has been done on AMX, so we should include a shout out to those that have worked on it (@colistro123, @AGraber, @Disinterpreter)
  • Acknowledge the work on mtasa-php-sdk by @ecastro98 and encourage people to try it out

Wiki

• If you encounter an already documented new feature, credit the authors of the wiki page
• Update Changes in 1.5.8.

MTA Client News

• Create MTA client news (add files to C:\ProgramData\MTA San Andreas All\1.5\news, and use the reloadnews command ingame to refresh the list of news items and preview changes)
• actually ship out news using ???? system

Release

• Bump version in code à la 0017cec (Done in Changed version to 1.5.8 #1707)
• Build new nightly
• Start rolling out the update
  • Bump the version number on the staff tools
    • nightly
    • full
    • minclient
    • release
  • Tag mainline using git tag 1.5.8 master and push using git push origin 1.5.8
    • Side note: I wish we prefixed our tags with v.

Social Media

• Publish forum news post (it's okay if you're late by a little)
• Announce on Discord (use @everyone and also publish to other guilds)
• Facebook
• Twitter
• ModDB
• Steam
• Create release on GitHub with link to the news post.
  • Upload binaries

Notes

There may be important things that I'm missing. Collaborators — please feel free to edit this issue with additional checkboxes.

Feature freeze

In #1377 we decided to experiment with a longer term feature freeze. Here are my reflections:

• I would recommend against doing long feature freezes again. I think setting a date "we will release 1.5.8 on Friday" and then freezing for 1 week, as we did with the release of 1.5.7, would still be appropriate. This would primarily be for ensuring stability, instead of focusing on developing bugfixes.
• The original plan was that we freeze for 1.5 months and release later. But we didn't set a specific day for our deadline, and we're not great at deadlines altogether, so we just ended up not merging features for months.
• Expectation vs. Reality: the idea of working entirely on bug fixes sounds great, but in reality very few contributors like spending their time working on bug fixes.

[qaisjp]

We'll need to wait some more time to make sure #1641 and #1644 is stable.

[Woovie]

What is our state presently? :)

[qaisjp]

Just added #1667 to the milestone, which is a recently caused bug.

[Disinterpreter]

From the dialog about AMX:

I guess we should change @theSpool to @AGraber

[qaisjp]

Alright, most things are done now. Just a few checkboxes (bumping the release class and the client news).

[Woovie]

ready for close?