[Csnd-dev] Csound 7.0 release planning

Hi everyone,

we’re about 1 month away from the Csound conference. I think it’s  time for us to begin discussing a plan to complete the release of version 7.0. Given the short time we have, we will need to prioritise what  we can deliver. Here’s a few points from my perspective:

1) we need to assess what we have to do now that cannot be done after the version bump. In my mind, this is mainly to do with keeping API & ABI compatibility.

2) API: we have to decide what is our starting point. It is possible to add functionality in latter versions (hosts using this may require a minimum version > 7.x) as we have done many times before.

3) Internal changes that do not break ABI compatibility are OK so we can leave things still to be implemented.

4) Restoring parts of the engine that are currently broken: there is one known instance in the parser that breaks backwards compatibility (multiple variable assignment, test3.csd) and CS_PAR semantic analysis has been removed from the parser. I think these two things need to be fixed before the release.
For CS_PAR we can optionally disable the option until this can be looked at.

5) Testing: we need to test the software more thoroughly, particularly the new additions (parser etc). Perhaps that is where the focus should be now?

As far as the new API status is concerned, I think we have the basic wrappers in the repo in sync, iOS, Android, WASM, ctcsound (may need a check); the Java wrapper is still an open question, should we keep maintaining one?

Finally, once we have made these decisions, we will need to see how releases will be built. I can continue to make MacOs and iOS packages locally but it would be more solid if these could be built by an automated CI service. At the moment, we build for these platforms in actions, but these builds are not designed for release (they have external dependencies from brew etc). We would need help to implement this properly. Similarly, we would need to do the same for Android.

Victor