Potabi Beta 3 Launch Issues: What is holding up release

Beta 3 was originally thought to take no longer than the difference between Beta 1 (Released October 6), and Beta 2 (Released October 22), with maybe an extra week - or at worst, two - to be released. That is a total expected beta cycle of 16 to 30 days ( 23 for the week long scenario). Currently, we are in the 13th day of development of beta 3. Surely not the longest time between development dates, but it is concerning with how far behind we are with the actual system release, and what has to happen in order for it to function.

For the sake of transparency, we need to talk about  what is going on, why there are problems, and what we will need to do to release beta 3. 

Let's talk about how release cycles are being calculated, why they are being calculated, and what is going on. Due to Potabi's extensive history and slow early development before the beta 1 release, the time before the October 6 beta release is ignored. Right now, we want to keep under 20 days in development per beta until 1.0 releases. There is a reason for this: 20 days is a lot of time, and we don't need the betas to be polished. We are using this 20 day metric + beta timelines to help plan for the 1.0 release, which is going to have a lot of interesting things going for it - considering it being a 1.0 release. At this time, if we get all of the next 5 planned betas released in this time frame, we could expect a release 116 days after October 6th - January 30, 2022 (expecting I don't stop working for holiday seasons, which to be honest I probably will work on the project during the holidays,  and expecting Beta X is the Beta 8 release, which it probably wont).

 Okay, so enough dilly-dally. What is the issue, and why? Well, there is a few. First is the inefficient system of installing packages that absolutely will be replaced. Right now, they are added by a shell script, and not via our original plan of simply using FuryBSD's uzip system, which kept giving error after error. Issue after issue.

Second is the unreliability of the builds for our software. While it might not seem like it, Potabi is in a ton of tough shit because of vulnerabilities - ones we cant really control, and have to work around. FreeBSD 13.0 released with an OpenSSL flaw, and a couple of bugs that make working with NodeJS 16.x (a version we have to use for the Potabi Welcome Application). Doing extensive testing to get it working is going to take a ton of time, but it is what we have to do. We don't have another option.

Hopefully we will get something working before November 11th. If you can, please help us test, or donate to the Patreon. Join the Discord server if you want to help support us build our software. Link: https://discord.com/invite/8s8nNwndtF. If you want, support us via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/potabi. Either would be amazingly helpful right now.

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