Yeah – I know. If you look down a few posts and you’ll see an announcement. I was typing it on a Saturday I think. I hit publish instead of Save and I figured – well – it won’t be long.
There were a couple of problems that popped up when it went to release. I’m not a developer. I can’t even pretend to understand what these guy do to make QGIS work. Anyway – they decided to hold it and fix the problems. It was a good thing and me going “IT’S OUT” didn’t help. I received a few emails and comments going “Where is it?” I responded and said It’s almost out. Be glad it was held – These good people care about your experience. They listen. They do good things.
To many – the desktop is a bit played out – for me it’s still an important component. From the email bag:
GIS is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. We are very pleased to announce the release of QGIS 2.8 'Wien'. Wien is German for 'Vienna' - host city to our developer meet up in November 2009 and again in March 2014. Long Term Release This is a special release since it is designated an 'LTR' (Long Term Release). LTR releases will be supported with backported bug fixes for one year, and will be in permanent feature freeze (i.e. no new features will be added, only bug fixes and trivial updates). The purpose of LTR releases is to provide a stable and less frequently changing platform for enterprises and organisations that do not want to deal with updating user skills, training materials etc. more than once per year. The success of the LTR is very much down to you, our beloved users - we need your support to help funding bug fixes and making sure in your support contracts with support providers specify that any bug fixes done on your behalf are applied to the LTR branch as well as our normal development branch. If an LTR is important to you, please consider also directly supporting the QGIS project, or encourage your commercial provider to use LTR as a basis for your enterprise solution so that everyone may benefit from a stable platform that is being continuously improved and refined. Note that for users and organisations that like to live on the frontier, our regular four monthly releases will continue unabated. New Features QGIS 2.8 is also a special release because it includes so many great new features, tweaks and enhancements to make the most popular Free desktop GIS even more feature filled and useful. Visit the visual changelog that highlights some of the new additions (http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog28/index.html). Whenever new features are added to software they introduce the possibility of new bugs - if you encounter any problems with this release, please file a ticket on the QGIS Bug Tracker (http://hub.qgis.org/). Please consult the existing and closed issues there before filing any new ones. The source code and binaries for Windows, Debian and Ubuntu are already available via the large download link on our home page (http://qgis.org/). More packages will follow as soon as the package maintainers finish their work. Please revisit the page if your platform is not available yet.