Good Afternoon everyone!
We had released 7.9.3 on Monday the 17th July with the focus on resolving High & Medium priority bugs that had been raised on Github (and the forums) since 7.9.2 (and 7.9.1). The aim was to provide a suitable release for the production environment - Release Notes
During the time we also were provided a number for Security issues through our security@suitecrm.com address (thanks to those raising them) which we also applied to our 7.9.3 release.
The schedule was then from 7.9.3 release to reduce the dedicated resource to move onto beginning 7.10 development and introduce our long awaited automated testing and develop tools process (which lack of partially lead to our less than successful 7.9.0 release). 7.9.x and beyond would still have dedicated resource to resolve the remaining issues but it would be focusing on High/Mediums with the Low fixes being Community led. This was until the product team have set up the finalised testing in place to then begin our bugfix-a-thon which is scheduled next after the automated testing on the 7.10 Roadmap.
However, it was raised that 7.9.3 had an immediate issue with languages causing special characters to be encoded/decoded incorrectly throughout the system – this was due to 1. not having suitable functional testing, and 2. not thorough enough process for manual testing for minor releases. This is the very thing we were tackling after the 7.9.3 was released and will continue to do so after the immediate release has been stabilised.
We made the decision to remove the 7.9.3 from our website until we have resolved the issue to which we have. We are currently resolving a couple of other outstanding high priories before the end of play tomorrow.
7.9.4 will be released tomorrow Thursday 20th with the issue above resolved and include all the Security fixes that 7.9.3 had provided.
Obviously we will keep an eye on the 7.9.4 release to ensure that its suitable to reduce the dedicated resources for the time being until we reach our bugfix-a-thon. But ideally we want to get the new test suite into place in the coming weeks/month.
The benefit for having a new test suite is so that new and old functionality can be tested accordingly quickly and thoroughly (depending on how good the test is of course). This will lead to less buggy ‘bugfixes’ and less bugs in new features as the tests will enforce better code.
So, the ETA for 7.9.4 is Thursday 20th and we would recommend everyone whom updated to 7.9.3 to do so immediately to 7.9.4 when released. We then will have dedicated resource for High/Medium bugs whilst working on the automated testing until our Bugfix-a-thon begins in the coming month.
Thank you again community for continuous feedback and raising issues on the forums and github!