the "alpha" label was a packaging error, it should have been set to be "stable". That said the release contains a number of serious bugs - we've already resolved a few of these and will be triaging others to see the scope of what we can fix quickly and when to release a 5.4.1 (likely in the next few days).

Please note, we're constantly striving to improve the release process. We had a number of very succesful monthly maintenance releases, which were solid and reliable and fixed a lot of bugs. The last 2 releases have been "feature" releases, so have involved much more new code. The failures to get them right first time out shows we need to change our process and involve other people (such as component vendors etc.) much earlier in the process (for at least the feature releases). Please rest assurred that this is something we'll be working hard on.

Cathal

Cathal,

Thanks for the response.  As you can imagine, it's terribly frustrating for the community to watch the ball get dropped on feature releases like this.

I can tell you that I read, write, and have occassionally modified source code, but it's terribly difficult for me to jump into the middle of a large codebase and try to locate bugs.  With that said, I'll try to keep that in mind and will attempt to keep up with the code changes.