towards 4.9.4

[Dirk Hohndel]

It's been forever (well, just over seven months and about 1400 commits) since our last desktop release.
I think I have all the outstanding PRs merged (and I just noticed that GitHub apparently lost our default settings for rebased-merges in the last couple of days and now we are back to having merge commits in master... grmbl).

Binaries should be building and available by the time I finished writing this email - the latest should always be here: https://github.com/Subsurface-divelog/subsurface/releases/tag/ci-release <https://github.com/Subsurface-divelog/subsurface/releases/tag/ci-release>

Obviously, a lot has changed since 4.9.3 and this deserves some solid testing.

At this point I have no time line as to when I'm hoping to release this. Given that few people are diving these days (and more or less no one is going on dive trips) there doesn't appear to be much urgency, but at the same time it might be harder to get people to actually TEST things.

Things that I know need doing and reviewing (and all of these I'm happy to receive help with):

- the user manual will need some updating to reflect the many changes that we've made
- all of the build infrastructures should be updated to the newest Qt version (and with the GitHub Actions anyone who is bored could actually work on this - macOS I think is the only real exception as I still build the 'actual' binaries here locally, but Windows, Android, Linux are all up for volunteers)
- we need to make sure that we are building for the current Linux distros (Ubuntu 20.04 is coming up, I'm not sure what the state is of Fedora, openSUSE and anything else we might have native packages for)
- I'm planning to work on making the git storage tests (a) work again at all and (b) more robust and useful -- I have set up a new backend server for the cloud storage that I want to migrate to in the next few weeks and would love to be feel a little more comfortable that this won't break things for people
- overall we need more tests and more test coverage -- but I've been saying this for years
- it would be good to make sure that we haven't broken things. I never use the planner, I rarely ever use pictures and videos, there are a lot of UI features that I never touch (like configure dive computer)

I'm sure I'm missing many things for this list, but I'll stop here since (as expected) most of the builds appear to have completed so you all can start testing :-)

To those of you following one of the major world religions - enjoy your high holidays. To us atheists: well, you're on your own and you know that.

/D
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