New Mauve release
I’m happy to say that a new Mauve release with many bugfixes has been made official today. Developing and maintaining Mauve has been a challenge for me over the years, and each release requires a seemingly tremendous amount of effort. Mauve has somewhere between hundreds and thousands of active users, each of whom seems to be running a different version of their favorite operating system and Java virtual machine. Every time we need to do a new Mauve release, we have to struggle to ensure that we haven’t broken functionality on the myriad of software configurations. Currently this is done using a slew of virtual machines running different operating systems, but the process is hardly automated. Clearly one goal for the future of Mauve would be to do more automated quality testing of the software. The automated testing might detect some types of problems really well, but others, such as the recent problem with OpenJDK drawing the display incorrectly, seem like they would be nearly impossible to detect programmatically. Nonetheless, if automated software testing can help find a problem before an unsuspecting user trips over it, surely it’s worth the effort. no?
