Dear users and devs,
you might have noticed a lack of activity recently, including a few pending
pull requests, but most importantly the missed summer release.
There are at least two main reasons: the three of us have been pretty busy
lately with other endeavours, and we tried to pack too many big changes in
the 1.3 release.
The separation between users and contests (which helps who is or will be
running CMS as a permanent training platform) was a horizontal change
touching most of CMS's code, and the longer testing is definitely something
we are taking advantage of.
More importantly, the new evaluation strategy, managing testcases
separately to dramatically cut evaluation times. We discovered at the IOI
that it puts a big strain on the Evaluation Service, which becomes the
bottleneck of the process in case of tens of workers. Since this is common
in big contests, we do not want to release the new version with this known
performance issue. We have a few ideas on how to preserve the new strategy
while avoiding the Workers' underutilization, but further testing and
understanding of the interactions with the database is needed.
For these reasons, we are sorry to say that there will skip the summer
release this year, and give our best to release 1.3 in winter with a proper
implementation of this new strategy.
-- Stefano
