Release notes for FusionForge 5.2
---------------------------------

FusionForge 5.2 is another incremental step over 5.1, with about 2600
commits.

There have been no in-depth rewrites this time, only a number of
improvements to various parts of the code.  The document manager
steadily grows in functionality, new widgets are available for users'
personal pages, the SCM plugins grew new features for hooks (on
supported systems), the trackers now offer a new view for roadmaps.
New plugins include a Message plugin allowing to display a global
message on the forge, and a MoinMoinWiki plugin.

Many bugs were of course fixed during the course of this development
cycle.

As before, this release comes with packages for Red Hat and Debian
systems (and derived distributions), as well as a rewritten installer
script for users of other systems (and those who prefer more manual
installations).  This release provides scripts to migrate what needs
to be migrated to the new schemes (for the database schema).  Care
should still be taken to check the results of these migrations, as a
safety net.

Release notes for FusionForge 5.1
---------------------------------

FusionForge 5.1 is another incremental step over 5.0, although it's a
large step in some regards, with about 3000 commits since version 5.0.

The FusionForge team would like to dedicate this release to the memory
of Alexandre Neymann, who passed away in March 2011.  Alexandre was
one of the founding members of the FusionForge project in 2009, and
one of its most active developers.  His death has meant a great loss
to us all.

On the user interface front, the project summary pages and users'
personal pages are now built out of blocks called "widgets" that can
be rearranged at will; these widgets (taken from Codendi) allow
greater flexibility on how the pages look.  A new theme, called Funky,
is now available, with a more modern feel (contributed by Capgemini).
In the same field, the old help window has been replaced with a new
unobtrusive tooltip system (Alcatel-Lucent).  A less visible aspect is
that the generated webpages are now much closer to full XHTML
compliance.

Among the improvements in features, the document manager has been
vastly rewritten (by Capgemini again), with more features and an
improved usability; more improvements are planned for the next
release, but this should bring the docman to something we're no longer
ashamed of :-)

Many improvements in the trackers have been contributed (by
Alcatel-Lucent), including a progress bar and improvements in sorting.

The permissions system has been enhanced and made more flexible, with
the new ability to have several roles at once in the same project and
to share roles across projects (contributed by Roland Mas as part of
the Coclico project).

New projects can now cloned from one of a set of configurable
templates, thus allowing forges to have standard shapes for their
common project organizations (Roland Mas, Coclico).

New plugins have been written or merged from Codendi as part of the
Coclico project: Mailman, Forumml, Hudson and SoapAdmin.  Not all are
production-ready yet, but they're made available for the adventurous.
Other new plugins include a gravatar plugin (Alain Peyrat) and a
"blocks" plugin allowing to add free descriptions in several places
(Alcatel-Lucent).

Behind the scenes, the configuration system has also been made
simpler, it now uses standard *.ini files that are taken into account
immediately; the Apache configuration files are also splitted out into
independent components, rather than a large generated file.  (Both by
Roland Mas.)

Another improvement making installation easier is the availability
packages in RPM format for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, in
addition to the *.deb packages for Debian-based distributions.
Installation from source is still supported, of course.

As usual, this release provides scripts to migrate what needs to be
migrated to the new schemes (in this case, for the database schema,
the configuration variables and the existing permissions).  Care
should still be taken to check the results of these migrations, as a
safety net.

Release notes for FusionForge 5.0
---------------------------------

FusionForge 5.0 is still an incremental step over 4.8, but many
changes have been made, some of which may require caution when
upgrading.

In particular, the rewriting of the version control subsystem created
the possibility for many new VCS tools to be integrated, and indeed
several new plugins were implemented (Arch, Bazaar, Darcs, Git and
Mercurial).  To avoid crowding the chroot, all repositories are now
hosted under a two-level subdirectory structure.  For instance, where
you had a CVS repositories stored under
/var/lib/gforge/chroot/cvsroot/<project>, you'll now have it under
.../chroot/scmrepos/cvs/<project>.  As a consequence, you need to move
the repositories by hand and/or add symlinks.  Previously existing
symlinks will also have to be updated, as well as previously existing
working copies obtained by users.

Also, the Mediawiki plugin was rewritten to allow for each project to
get their own independent wiki.  The wiki for project foo-bar is now
stored in the plugin_mediakiki_foo_bar in the same database as the
rest of the forge.  This means the data should be migrated from the
existing database to this new location.  Depending on your setup and
the amount of data involved, it might make sense to either cut and
paste by hand or dump the tables and reload them in the new schema.

On the internal side of things, access to the database has been
converted from the db_query() abstraction layer to the
db_query_params() one.  This means SQL queries are no longer built as
strings with unwieldy and fragile escaping code, while ensuring no
data coming from the user can be used for SQL injection attacks.  The
db_query() function, while deprecated, is still present for the
benefit of out-of-tree code that might use it.  It might be removed at
some point in the future, so maintainers of local plugins or
enhancements are encouraged to migrate their code to
db_query_params().  For really complex queries that need to be built
dynamically, there's also a db_query_qpa() abstraction, with a
db_construct_qpa() method to manipulate "QPA" (query+params array)
objects.

On a more visible note, the default theme has been reworked to
increase the accessibility of the web pages; this rewrite also brings
better maintainability, easier customisation by CSS and more
conformant XHTML.


Release notes for FusionForge 4.8
---------------------------------

FusionForge 4.8 is an incremental step from 4.7, and the changes are
less far-reaching than the ones in 4.7.  Most notably, they include:
- A new project classification system based on tags (with a tag cloud).
- A new reporting page on the FRS displaying the number of downloads
  per package.
- The “Project List” can now display a list of all projects.
- The “wiki” plugin now uses the latest PHPwiki code.

The upgrade from 4.7 should be straightforward.


Release notes for FusionForge 4.7
---------------------------------

This is the first public release of FusionForge.  FusionForge is based
on GForge, and started as an identical copy, with only a name change
to avoid confusion with the proprietary versions of GForge (known as
GForge Advanced Server or GForge AS).  As such, it benefits from
mature code and known-good infrastructure, and builds on it for the
future.

This 4.7 release is focused on bringing the recent evolutions out to
the community in an official stable release.  This should provide a
solid base as a starting point for community-based development, making
it easier for enhancements to be maintained.  The FusionForge name was
chosen to reflect this: this is a community effort, and we hope to
hear about your improvements.  Contributing these improvements would
make their future long-term maintenance easier for everyone.

Major changes since previous versions (of GForge) include:
- Support for PHP5.
- Support for PostgreSQL 8.x.
- Translations are now managed by gettext.
- Support for several configurations running on the same code.
- Improved security, no need for PHP register_globals.
- Available as full install CD.
- New wiki plugins (using MediaWiki or phpWiki).
- New online_help plugin.
- New phpwebcalendar plugin.
- New project hierarchy plugin.

Things to keep in mind when installing:
- FusionForge is based on GForge, and the renaming is quite recent.
  So the code still contains lots of references to GForge.  This will
  be fixed as time passes.
- Full text search using the primitives provided by PostgreSQL 8.3
  isn't quite complete yet.
- Not all plugins are packaged for all distributions yet.

Things to keep in mind when upgrading:
- Since internationalisation was changed from a hand-made system to
  standard gettext, locally customised translations will no longer
  override standard ones.  This will be addressed in a future release.

For more up-to-date information, please visit http://fusionforge.org/
or http://fusionforge.fusionforge.org/ -- you can even join us on IRC
from there!

 -- The FusionForge development team
