It's been almost three months since the 1.4.0 releases and quite a number of
issues have been fixed in RTT and OCL. No major features have been added yet
on the RTT branch. OCL had more feature additions and even some new
components for camera vision.

There are 22 bugs open on the RTT, but none are critical, or are only feature
requests. The most important fixes are

481 connectPorts only partially connects two read ports
482 Corba's createMethodAny and createCommandAny methods broken
486 SimulationThread locks up system under Xenomai 2.4

and a lot of documentation and unit testing updates were done as well. For
OCL, more bugs are open (about 32). I want these issues fixed by 1.4.1:

511 Error when creating TimerComponent
500 Howto load external toolkits
311 ReportingComponent should use ORO_SCHED_OTHER by default
315 Reporting and autotrigger

There are lots more issues to be addressed in OCL, but most of them can only
be fixed in a 1.6 release, as they require API additions. If you don't agree,
post a note. Also the RTT has some outstanding issues which require a 1.6
release. I'll start tagging these features in Bugzilla with a '1.6.0'
milestone. These 1.6 features can be committed on trunk the coming month. A
RTT/OCL 1.6 release can be expected by the end of march.

For OCL, there's also the KDL dependency for the motion components, which
aren't packaged yet. I'm asking the motion control people to apply the
necessary fixes in trunk/ocl/debian if they want them released as well. I'll
also require a tested and 'dpkg-buildpackage' ready kdl branch.[*] If one of
these things fails, I'll revert to the current packaging status.

From 1.4.1 on, I'll start releasing the Debian packages from the rtt-1.4 /
ocl-1.4 branches, such that builders from source have the same fixes as the
Debian package users. Expect the branches to be up to date by 22 Feb. and the
releases by 29 Feb.

Peter

[*] ready KDL branch: Choose a library so-version number which reflects the
stability of the API: For example, libkdl.so --> libkdl.so.1.0 means you
won't remove or rename functions in the 1.x versions. If you can't guarantee
that, use libkdl.so --> libkdl.so.0.99 until you're sure. Adding
functions/classes is allowed in each 1.x -> 1.y release. Set the
debian/changelog accordingly.