1.18 Release Planning

[ilevkivskyi]

I think it is time to start planning for 1.18. It would be great to release rather sooner than later since we had a bunch of non-trivial changes recently.

cc @JukkaL

[ilevkivskyi]

Btw one thing worth discussing is what should we do about fixed format cache in this release:

• Keep it completely internal (i.e. do not announce/expose in any way)
• Announce it, but mention it is still experimental/unstable
• Something else?

I think the second option may be best, it would be good to know if anyone relies on JSON format in any way (especially taking into that hopefully fixed format cache will soon be default).

[emmatyping]

I would definitely announce it, ideally with a suggestion of how people can benchmark it/try it out. Might be useful to get more data on performance and it's always good to catch bugs early.

[CoolCat467]

From 1.17.0 release planning, #18615 is still yet to be merged

[sterliakov]

I agree that announcing new cache mode as experimental gives the most benefit: we get more early testers while warning everyone that they use it at their own risk.

I would really appreciate it if #19347 could make its way into this release - it's a trivial 3-line bugfix diff for a problem with no viable workaround.

[ilevkivskyi]

Btw I just noticed we still have argparse.SUPPRESS for --allow-redefinition-new. I think we should announce it (as experimental) in 1.18, and deprecate --allow-redefinition in 1.19 (assuming all goes well). Although implementation of the former may be less polished, the logic looks much more natural/intuitive to me.

[KevinRK29]

Hey, I'll be the release manager for this release. I'll be cutting the release branch by today and plan on releasing by mid next week!

[KevinRK29]

I cut the release branch 1.18 from this commit acacc9eba333701efbc1beedfe87245d4743bf94. I can cherry pick any fixes as well

[brianschubert]

(that's acacc9e from Sept 1 for the lazy :-)

[brianschubert]

#19792 (comment) uncovered some silently failing tests from a new feature added in #19099. Ideally those tests / the feature should be fixed, but if that proves troublesome or would hold up the release, another option would be to revert #19099 on the release branch

[KevinRK29]

Version bumped on master to 1.19.0+dev in 4007c7d

[KevinRK29]

Hey @BobTheBuidler, would you be able to fix the issue in 06f97b2 that @brianschubert has mentioned in time for the planned release next week?

[BobTheBuidler]

I think merging #19217 will fix that, I'm working on wrapping it up as we speak