Hi!
I've got an important information to share. I'd like to announce the Scala 2.11.3 artifacts as being dead on arrival. The 2.11.3 artifacts that got released to Maven Central have a critical bug related to binary compatibility. Please stick to using Scala 2.11.2 until 2.11.4 is released which is planned to happen as soon as we fix all critical bugs found in Scala 2.11.3. The rest of my email will discuss the events that led to a broken Scala release, next steps we're planning to take.
Why did broken release got published
We've received two critical bug reports for Scala 2.11.3 release. The first bug (
SI-8899) is about broken binary compatibility of Scala's standard library. The second bug (
SI-8900) is a compiler crash preventing a few projects from compiling.
The binary compatibility breakage is caused by a human mistake introduced by pull request
#3949. That pull request disables our automatic binary compatibility checks for certain library classes. The pull request includes the reasoning why we thought this is safe to do. As is turned out, we were wrong in our judgement and the full explanation what went wrong can be found
here.
The compiler crash got introduced by
fixes in Scala compiler's backend. Check SI-8900 and linked pull requests for details.
I'd like to comment on why our automatic testing didn't catch those problems. The binary compatibility checking was disabled as a human error. Moreover, the
community build doesn't help with testing binary compatibility because all projects are being recompiled from source. That's because we use the same config to test both 2.11.x and 2.12.x branches. The compiler crash would have been caught by community builds if the projects that crash the compiler have been included in the config. If you would like to help the Scala project, please have a look into adding more projects to community build. We need to distribute the work if we want to grow the list of projects we are testing Scala compiler against.
What are the next steps
We'll go through all reports we have received so far and determine the importance the issues. The two issues discussed above will be fixed and once we regain our confidence, we'll move forward with 2.11.4 release. In particular, the focus of 2.11.4 process is just to fix the critical issues that went into 2.11.3. Any other work will be postponed to 2.11.5 release.
We'll also look into some additional testing we can introduce that will prevent such problems to happen in the future.
I'd like to thank a several community members that tried Scala 2.11.3 even before it got officially announced and quickly reported the issues they found. This prevented the Scala 2.11.3 release from being officially announced and prevented from bigger damage to happen!
--
Grzegorz Kossakowski