When next release?

[dB2510]

Hello maintainers 👋

First off, apologies if this isn’t the best way to ask, feel free to redirect me if there’s a preferred channel for release-related discussions.

I’m currently building a Go SDK that relies on kyber for BLS operations. I noticed that the latest tagged release is v3.1.0 from November 2022. Since then, there have been a number of important changes — including deprecations, new features, and some open PRs (like #551) that would be great to have in a tagged release.

I had a few questions:
• Is there a timeline or plan for the next release?
• Is there a label or project board to track release-related updates?
• Happy to help in any way to fast-track the process (testing, docs, release prep, etc.)

Also, I noticed that some v4-tagged releases appear to be older than the latest v3.x, just to clarify, would the next release be a continuation of v3, or are we moving toward a stable v4 soon?

Thanks for maintaining this great library 🙏 Looking forward to contributing however I can.

cc: @AnomalRoil @ineiti @nkcr @Kubuxu @jbsv

[ineiti]

Hi there,

great you're using the library! The official maintainers are @jbsv and @pierluca , I'm mostly hanging around here :) Just some random thoughts/comments:

• the v4-pre-tags were from a time where we were confident we'll get a new version out, but then we wanted to add even more, and finally decided against making a new release :)
• there are many incompatible changes now in the latest main, so I think sooner or later a v4 seems like a good idea

[pierluca]

Hi @dB2510,
Thank you for your interest, and we absolutely welcome the discussion on GitHub and your contributions.
You're right, v3 is quite old at this point and our resources have been focused on the release of a v4 "soon".

To answer your question:

• Is there a timeline or plan for the next release?
  Realistically, we are aiming to have a release by early summer at the latest, but we could accelerate the timeline with a little bit of help. In principle, we'd love to release ASAP, but we have limited resources spread across several projects, some public and some internal, which limits our speed on any single project.

• Is there a label or project board to track release-related updates?
  Label "v4" is what we use to capture the developments that we consider necessary before the release of v4. Non-breaking changes, such as Add gnark as bls-12-381 backend #551, may be integrated in v4 itself (if they're ready by then) or in a subsequent (minor) release. Breaking changes that we do not plan to introduce in v4 are already marked with label "v5"

• Happy to help in any way to fast-track the process (testing, docs, release prep, etc.)
  That's much appreciated. The v4 issues above are the main ones that need attention. There's quite a bit of discussion happening (offline) around Use fixed-length integers to improve cross-platform compatibility #492 as resolving it in a backwards-compatible way (a goal) is necessary and non-trivial, but if you have some spare cycles, we aren't yet looking into Remove deprecated code ahead of v4 release #557 and that could be a useful issue to tackle.

• Would the next release be a continuation of v3
  Categorically no :-) we've had to introduce several API breaking changes, including for security reasons, and we recommend switching over to v4 as soon as it's released.