I’m responsible for the windows builds, but yeah, lets go with the Special forces and Delta Force thing instead cause that sounds waaaaaaay more interesting 
LazyDodo: Just ignore people who want push release too soon without checking and overchecking again to get a quality release, take time long as needed to release quality 2.79a. Look for example Unreal forums as there are lot of people who demand release and after that scream that here is bug and here is bug and so on…
@LazyDodo, let me just say thank you. Even through not a techno it has occurred to me who makes this program available to Windows, Mac and Linux users. And, it seems here you are sir. Where I can thank you in person so to speak although Windows 10 drove me to Linux. I never cease to wonder about all the committed people in the background bringing us this program. So once again thank you.
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The developer meeting notes are often understood as being official statements, but they are clearly just meeting notes. It is not like there are 20 developers who are only working on that release. We all know that there are very few developers and especially the ones who work fulltime are working on multiple topics at the same time and that’s why it is not really a surprise that this low priority topic is being pushed back.
Those are just meeting notes. If you can’t handle them, don’t read them.
Thank you all developers from me too to who makes so fast and lightweight 3d creation suite for free.
I’ll take your thanks in the form of you treating all people equally, nobody deserved the yelling you gave me regardless if they worked on blender on not.
‘i’ll be ready when it’s ready, regardless of the day’
No apology necessary mate since you braced me with that statement. Given that this forum is worldwide our choice of words and the response is going across cultures. And, I doubt if any of us are diplomats. God knows I’m no poster boy for America in any way shape or form. But, in my old blue collar mind I took offense at the way you put that. And, would have even if you had identified yourself as one of those tireless workers who make Blender possible. So the thanks is heartfelt but an apology hell no.
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Yeah something probably got lost in translation, what i meant was, when we think it’s ready and it’s sunday, we’re not gonna sit on it for 4 days…
But let me ruin your day a tiny bit more… when the meeting notes say ‘probably Wednesday’ and we actually hit that date, that generally means that the platform teams would get the ‘ahoy’ notice to start building the releases on that day, depending a bit on the availability of all people involved that sometimes can take a few days (some releases we did in a couple of hours though) then they upload the build, which then needs to sync though the mirror sites, and only then the website gets updated for public consumption (usually 1-4 days after the ‘ahoy’ signal)
That is if we decide to go with a final release, sometimes there’s a testbuild1/2/3 before releasing a final build (I have no idea what the plan is for 2.79a) depending a bit on how many risky patches are involved.
You seem very excited for what is essentially a bugfix release, I looked through the list of included fixes there’s really nothing to get overly excited about, sure bugfixes are nice, especially if it’s one you regularly run into, still nothing groundbreaking in there. The nightly builds is where most of the exciting stuff lives (faster render times, cpu+gpu rendering, rendering scenes bigger than your gpu’s memory etc…)
some 279a food for thought & 'till soon…
enjoy creative moments
add en dum… ah, just saw the post - assume ‘a’ is just a fix, no candidate for it… thus…
Is there a Windows testbuild of 2.79a available? I believe 2.79a is using python 3.5 as 2.79 is? There is a bug fix slated for 2.79a, but the daily builds are using python 3.6 IIRC, and the add-on that needs that bug fix uses python 3.5.
Otherwise I’ll wait for an official release 
I wouldn’t exactly call it excited since I compared it to sending off cereal box tops with a quarter waiting on a some shit that would only interest a kid. Or, waiting on 2.49. And, at eighty sometimes these thoughts occur to me. But, have it your way mate. And, by the way I’m not Australian but mate was how fellow workers were referred to in shipyards.
But, simply have it your way. And, have a nice day tomorrow. I sure as hell intend on doing exactly that.
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Will there in 2.79a only be bug fixes or will there also be some ( small ) things added?
I need / want to try the new bevel shader ( if this is not in 2.79a, which version should I get? ).
According to the link posted by burnin, 2.79a will be only bugfixes without Cycles improvements.
You can download a daily build of master on builder.blender.org to test bevel shader.
That’s a strange feeling to see an upcoming corrective release when bugtracker seems to be stuck to 375 open bugreports.
Only 45 are incomplete bugreports or issues with a low priority. Most of open bugreports are referred to real failures.
It is a little bit frustrating to see fixes excluded for some reason.
And when you take a look to hundreds of confirmed bugreports and issues with normal priority, you can easily find a dozen that will make you say “that’s a pity to not have this solved” or “do not refer to 2.79a as a rock-solid release”.
They have to make compromises. If 2.79x is supposed to be rock-solid, you would need to push back 2.8 by several months. From my point of view, the situation is not that different from previous versions or even from other software.
I know that. It is just that with hundreds of bugs known at its release time ( that are not relative to orphan areas but often things that just don’t work or are not supported when user could legitimately expect it to be supported in regards to present features).
Users would be right to ask for a 2.79b just before or after 2.80 beta release.
They will play with 2.8. But they will work with 2.79a.
At one point, they have to make a cut and I sincerely hope this is going to be after 2.79a. 2.8 was started to give them an extended time frame to work on new functionality and to take away the constant maintenance burden which did not allow major new development or took extremely long. If you ask for a 2.79b release, you are forcing them into a situation they didn’t want to have.
We have to remember, Blender is a lot more complex than what it was at, say, 2.49. It´s just not reasonable to assume a bugcount of <50. This is not a small list of bugfixes either. Considering this will (likely) be the last release until 2.8, which probably won´t be released until SIGGRAPH, I´d prefer they make sure there´s no (acute) need for more bugfix releases.
That said, release ahoy for an RC build has been done today - rejoice! 
I am just saying that does not look serious to make an RC when some crasher have been reported and not solved.
Or when there are patches waiting to be cleaned up since one year for problem like this one.
https://developer.blender.org/T50398
Contrary to other software, Blender is very open about those issues and you can relatively easily have a look at all the known issues. It is unfortunately very common to release software that has known bugs which cause crashes. Usually, we just don’t know about them. This does not mean that they are not taking those issues seriously.
Not all those issues can easily be solved and it is very likely that if the get fixed, some other issues appear. It is not unusual that a proper fix requires that the code needs to be refactored which often leads to a task which takes several days and the possibility that new bugs are created because of it or that bugs in other areas pop up. Issues that are not easily solved or the ones with a high risk of having unwanted side effects are usually not used in those bug fix releases.
Edit:
Not taking it seriously clearly looks different than this to me: https://developer.blender.org/T53683