Well, there comes a time when one has to decide whether the state of a 
software is "good enough" to be marked as stable. There is quite a 
difference between claiming that it is perfect and saying that it is good 
enough.

Concerning the current state of the CVS tree, we could ask three 
questions:

1. Is it perfect?
2. Does it work?
3. Is it good enough?

For the first question, the answer is of course no. There are many known 
deficiencies and bugs ranging from irritants to beauty spots. The list of 
unknown bugs is of course unknown, but there is no doubt in my mind that 
more serious bugs will eventually be discovered. However, I also think 
that currently, the only way to discover them is to put Mod_Survey into 
heavy use. Time will hunt down the bugs for us. The two things I like the 
least with the current state of things is that the discussion about CSS is 
unfinished, and that the documentation is quite far from being complete.

For the second, the answer is an unqualified yes. The CVS tree or 
corresponding code has been used in production in many places, including 
on the university hosting this mailing list. A three-month old CVS version 
has been used for running a summer course this summer, and so far the only 
bugs discovered have been minor irritants regarding stylesheets and 
layout.

For the third, I am thus now concluding: Yes, it is good enough to be 
called stable. The current CVS is an order of magnitude more mature and 
thought-through than the old stable release 3.0.15, which further contains 
known security issues. I have dropped 3.0.x from everything I personally 
run, and only use 3.2.x.

A lot has happened since 3.0.x, too many changes to include in the 
announcement. The changelog contains them all. The ones I view as the most 
important changes are (in no particular order):

* Completely new multipaging supporting conditional branching and routing,
   with no size limitations, and without the need to reference non-XML
   external files.
* Dynamic contents with the ability to reference submitted variables.
* Color/font markup inside parameters.
* Perl scripting inside surveys. 
* Ability to include external files into a survey, thus making it easy to,
   for example, have the same header for all pages in a survey chain.
* Major code cleanups making the behind-the-scenes work with Mod_Survey
   much more logical and easy, and also making the code a lot more
   efficient.
* Radically improved theming/stylesheeting capabilities
* Completely rewritten data export module including many improvements,
   such as a logical API to ease writing new data exports.
* Sanity parsing pretty much everywhere to prevent script injection 
* No forbidden characters in input
* Ability to mail each submitted case to the survey author
* Fine-grained access control not requiring .htaccess files
* IMPORT tag for including data from a database
* API for sessions, voiding problems with GET-strings becoming too long.
* CUSTOM tags can define completely new question types.
* Randomization and uniqueness checking over both rows and columns in
   MATRIX
* OTHERFIELDs in CHOICE
* Date-stamping and timing answers

For users who still use 3.0.x, I'd like to recommend upgrading. However, 
there are a few reasons why one might choose not to. These include:

* Backwards-compatibility. Surveys written for 3.0.x will not run
   unmodified on 3.2.x.
* Persistence has not been ported.
* Sympa integration and SOAP authentication has not been ported.
* Presentations has not been ported.

Anyway, the stable release is available for download now. While at it, I'd 
like to thank all the people who helped making this happen, especially the 
italian gang. Most of the MATRIX updates and the conditional branching was 
written by Silvia, and the IMPORT and many, many other things was written 
by BugAnt.

At the time of sending this mail, the download link is available from the 
home page (click on the download menu item), but I haven't done a 
freshmeat announcement yet, nor put the news up on the front page.

   // Joel
Skickat av Joel Palmius <joel.palmius <at> mh.se>
till survey-discussion