MOC 2.6-alpha1 Released

After a week of celebration and festivities throughout MOCdom at the release of MOC 2.5.0, today we deliver MOC 2.6-alpha1! But don't get too excited; this release doesn't contain any bug fixes or new features.

So why release it? This is a housekeeping release which will form the basis of MOC 2.6 development. It cleans the code base of the obsolete, deprecated and transitional cruft inherited from the 2.5 release series.

If you have successfully made the transitions signalled in the previous release, then you should probably upgrade to this release. Although it is an alpha release, it should be no less stable than 2.5.0.

You will also note that from this release we are changing the naming of development releases by dropping the micro-version number; under the previous naming convention, this release would have been called "2.6.0-alpha1". The naming of stable and maintenance releases will remain unchanged.

Also changing is the compression used for the distribution files. The source tarball will be XZ-compressed, and the signature file will be that of the uncompressed tarball (which allows for retention of the original signature file with redistributions using a different compression) and ASCII armoured.

Therefore, the files of this release are:

moc-2.6-alpha1.tar.xz
moc-2.6-alpha1.tar.asc

and would be verified thusly:

xzcat moc-2.6-alpha1.tar.xz | gpg --verify moc-2.6-alpha1.tar.asc -

Of course, you'll also need the MOC Release Signing Key:

gpg --recv-key 0x2885A7AA

for which the fingerprint is still:

5935 9B80 406D 9E73 E805 99BE F312 1E4F 2885 A7AA

John Fitzgerald,
MOC Maintainer.