First bug hunting session starts October 21, 2016

Oct 8, 2016 11:00 GMT  ·  By

We've been informed by The Document Foundation's Italo Vignoli that the next major release of the popular LibreOffice office suite, version 5.3, will soon enter development and the first bug hunting session takes place in two weeks.

Yes, that's right, we're talking about LibreOffice 5.3, which will get an Alpha pre-release version in the week of October 17, a few days before the first bug hunting session, which is currently scheduled for Friday, October 21, 2016. During the bug hunting session, LibreOffice developers and hackers will perform tests on the LibreOffice 5.3 Alpha build in an attempt to fix as many bugs as possible.

"During the dedicated sessions, we will concentrate all efforts to chase and reproduce the bugs, in order to confirm and file them in a more comprehensive way. Of course, the more comprehensive will be the bug report, the easier will be for the developers to solve the bugs in time for the final release," says Italo Vignoli, Co Founder, Marketing & PR, The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice 5.3 release schedule

LibreOffice 5.3's development cycle includes a single Alpha release, and after the first bug hunting session later in October, there will be a second one later this year for the Beta version of LibreOffice 5.3, which should arrive for public testing in the week of November 21. If multiple bugs are discovered after the Beta 1 release, there might be a Beta 2 in the following week, around December 7, 2016.

After that, the development cycle of LibreOffice 5.3 will continue with three Release Candidate (RC) versions, the first one being scheduled for Christmas 2016. In January 2017, there might be another bug hunting session and two more RCs. LibreOffice 5.3 Release Candidate 2 should hit the streets in the week of January 9, and the third RC is set to arrive in the week of January 23, 2017.

The LibreOffice 5.3 development cycle will finish at the end of January, when the final release could hit the streets on February 1, 2017. Builds will be available as usual for GNU/Linux (DEB and RPM) distributions, along with the sources, as well as for macOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Stay tuned for more LibreOffice 5.3 news soon, right here on this space.