Hey guys!
We've been hard at work shifting through issues and PRs to get 3.8 completed.
One month was an aggressive turnaround, but we felt it was needed to avoid the "5-6 months late" thing that cropped up when trying to work through 3.7. That said, a glance at the github milestone indicates we're 2 weeks late.
So what gives?
Well, 3.8 had a relatively short list of active issues and PRs, but a big one was ironing out the major walls in Linux support. 3.7 introduced Linux support, but there was a lot of stuff that didn't get the testing it deserved, so while it functioned, there were a lot of cases where things would go awry. A lot of that has to do with how tricky it can be to juggle support for the various Linux distros, compared to Windows or OSX.
So we tried to target graphical issues, and also some niggling issues with SDL as the platform layer. Part of this is because in the future, we'd like to gut all the custom platform code and just have the platform code act as a wrapper to SDL with some additional helper functions. This would go a long way to make the codebase leaner, and less stuff that can go pearshaped because no one is remotely familiar with what the original writer was doing.
However, as we started pulling on those SDL threads, more and more frays began to crop up, which meant other things that needed to be fixed.
Happily though, as far as we've been able to tell, there's on a few remaining issues pertaining to utilizing SDL as a platform layer, and a few outstanding problems with what we've got mapped so far for current Linux support, meaning that we shouldn't see many new PRs go into the stack, and we can finish up whittling down the ones that are there while reaping the benefits of everything working much better than before.
So, to conclude the update, everything's moving along and wrap-up and an RC is impending.
A huge thank you for everyone that's helped out so far, especially Az and TMM who have spearheaded a lot of the "make Linux not a shambling horror" effort.