5.8 Release Plans

Overview

Now that we’ve decided to call 5.7 done after 5.7.2, it’s time to start working on planning for 5.8. Please note that these are aspiration goals, and mainly pointing the rough direction that the release will take, but could change based on the needs of the community.

5.8 Modern Retro

• Retro in the front, modern in the back. Keep the retro look and feel while ensuring that everything runs on modern hardware.
• Upgrade to Visual Studio 2022 on Win32 for C++17
• Upgrade to GCC 10/Debian 11 as the base image.
• Easier linux doors on dosemu2
• Easier use of qemu for doors on 64-bit operating systems

Here's the older themes for historical reference

Main Themes in 5.6 and 5.7 (More Retro Usability)

• Switch to NetFoss for Doors.
• Improved menu editor/menu system.
• Continue to make polish improvements to message networking support.
• New ACS system for better ACLs on menu items, subs, conferences, etc.
• Continue to improve code quality, clean up old code, etc.
• Improve test coverage, especially for networking code.

5.5 (Retro Usability)

• TIC support, continue to improve FTN support
• Full screen message editor
• Continue to improve code quality, clean up old code, etc.
• Improve test coverage, especially for networking code.

5.4

Like 5.3, 5.4 will be a continuation of the same ideas from 5.2

• 5.4 added wwivd as a better telnet and network daemon.
• Many new options to wwivconfig were added for editing the network settings.
• wwivconfig support for editing wwivnet config files
• full screen message viewer
• Complete FTN support so it's very usable for non-hub setups.
• Improve Linux Support so it’s a first class platform in all respects.

5.3

• Made FTN usable for day-to-day operations for non-hub systems.
• WWIVD was also created to replace wwiv-server
• Enable the BBS to run solidly on Linux on one of 3 linux platforms WWIV is produced.
• WWIVbasic created for scripting suppor.

5.2

• FTN networking support in an Alpha quality.
• Completed the basics of the MSGAPI for WWIV type-2 message bases.
• NetworkB also learned how to talk to pure BinkP servers and is considered BinkP 1.0 compatible, and no longer just “binkp-ish”.

5.1

• The birth of net51 for native win32 and linux networking (fit nicely with the goal of improving WWIVnet and gets it closer to being viable across platforms and for the internet era.