Just wondering if anyone happens to know what's happening/planned for future releases of the BOINC client. The last "stable" release was 7.6.22 in December 2015 -- almost a year ago. The last development release is 7.6.33 in June 2016. Seems like things have stopped. There is a question on this posted on the BOINC message board a few days ago but no answer currently....

Frankly just wondering what's going on....

Hi Art

In the BOINC/dev News section:

New governance model

Hi Les,

Hmmm....Interesting. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place for any sign progress being made (or considered) by this new "community based" development model for the BOINC client. I'll look around on the BOINC site more...perhaps there is a focus group that I'm not aware of.

Art Masson

Looked around a bit, but can find no real signs of how/what the new "community based" BOINC development process is progressing. If anyone has insights, please share.

Frankly concerned that BOINC is becoming an orphan -- but hoping that's not true since keeping it viable is critical to all the distributed processing projects.

https://www.openhub.net/p/boinc
https://gridcoin.us/Dev/boincdevtest.htm

Hi Art

It depends on who has volunteered to work on it.
And on what ideas have been raised in the past.
Progress will most likely be on the developers email list, so not generally viewable.

Les,

Yes understand. Just seems like not much is happening at all since the last stable BOINC client release for Windows is now almost a year old (Dec 2015). Perhaps there are no/few volunteers actually participating...or I guess it's possible that there was just not much to do over the last year.

Hopefully the various BOINC clients for Windows, Linux, Android and Mac OS X will stay viable as OS versions progress, bugs are found, or security vulnerabilities are discovered.

Art

If people look at the BOINC/dev forums, they can see the latest "improvement" to said forum.

Hello Art and Hello everyone,
Art, are you subscribed to the following BOINC developers List?
if not, it might supply you with some useful information.
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I hope this helps.
Best Wishes,
Byron

Hopefully the various BOINC clients for Windows, Linux, Android and Mac OS X will stay viable as OS versions progress, bugs are found, or security vulnerabilities are discovered.

The biggest problem we have now is that we've lost the developer responsible for building the Windows and Linux clients. He moved states and is working full time for another company for now. It may be that in the near future he'll build something for BOINC again, but I wouldn't stay up for it.

The developer for the Mac still does things on a voluntary basis.

As for Android, it would seem that a volunteer has been found who is now trying to update the client, progress of that can be followed on Github: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/1702
You can also follow what code is being added, via https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/commits/master

Building the client by users is possible, though. An easy to use build program was added to the source code some time ago. You just have to follow what it says on the tin: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/CompileClient#Windows. But then again, that is something for advanced users.

---

Jord.

Not sure if this is correct place to post this but since it is BOINC related... I have just installed the latest version - 7.6.33 - apparently have a bug that tells me that my password is incorrect and then and then stops everything! Have gone back to the previous version - 7.6.22. Fortunately don't appear to have lost anything.

That's mentioned near the top of this thread on the BOINC site.

You may need to keep an on it there to see if there's a solution.

I have been running Boinc 7.6.33 for 4 days now and have not had any problems. Win7 64 bit 8Gb of RAM.

I have been running ti for a few days without problems too though on one machine, I only installed it (under WINE) because something had corrupted my client_state.xml so boinc.exe kept crashing. - lost all the work on that machine. It didn't sort the problem, but deleting boinc data directory did.

Net Net is that there has not been an update/new release of BOINC for Windows and Linux for 8 months since June 2016 (version 7.6.33). I fear the product will not stay viable on all the OS platforms if something doesn't change with the development approach.

Obviously not a direct issue for this forum, but will eventually impact CPDN if the BOINC software doesn't stay current over time.

This has just been mentioned on the BOINC message boards: here.

No idea what it means, but it sounds real techie. :)

Maybe it means something like "7.6.33 < 7.6 < 7.6.34" ?

Or "7.6.33 <> 7.6 = 7.6.34" ?

:-S

I've asked on the BOINC Client Development message board if this means a 7.6.34 release is coming soon and if so, what OS platforms are targeted. Worth a try...maybe someone will respond.

This is the response I got back when I asked if a new release is imminent. Short answer is that there is no release manager currently responsible for BOINC...so it seems that BOINC remains an orphan application at present.

.........Response from the BOINC Development Forum follows:


No.

As Christian Beer answered to Claggy in Github:

Releasing a new client version is a multi-step process. At the start there is the version change commit and a git lightweight tag on that commit but then someone has to build official binaries for all platforms and package them into the respective installer bundles.

Technically what you submitted is the first step, someone else would need to create the git tag and build the official installers from that. Then begins the testing of these packages. Then this someone (usually called Release Manager) adds commits from master to the release branch and creates a new version and so on.

So unless there is a Release Manager who actually prepares and does a release, I don't see a reason to do the version change or tagging.

Also from a technical perspective this should all be done from within the BOINC repository because every PR always introduces a merge commit which should be avoided in the release branch (because it is very confusing later.

There is now some progress to develop, test, and release a new version (7.7.2) of the BOINC client for Windows.
(Not sure what happended to any versions between 7.6.33 and 7.7.2) This is an email quote below from the BOINC Development Thread:

I released a new version of the client for Win.
Changes:

- An accumulation of enhancement/fixes in the manager and client since June 2016.
- The Vbox versions include VBox 5.1.18
- not code-signed (I didn't have the $200 needed to renew the certificate).
- built by me rather than Rom (hopefully I did it right).

Please give it a try.
Alpha testers can report bugs here:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/alpha/test_form.php

-- David