The third major release of siunitx was out in May, after the TeX Live 2021 DVD. That means it’s been picked up primarily by more active users: people who install TeX between the ‘fixed’ DVD releases (or who use MiKTeX). It also didn’t initially appear on Overleaf, as they take a while to test TeX Live images before making them public.

I’ve been making maintenance releases between May and now, and have reached v3.0.36, picking off small (or less small) issues I’d missed initially. At the same time, Overleaf now have a TeX Live 2021 image (currently featuring siunitx v3.0.23). So I now have an increasing number of ‘normal’ users: people who don’t want to deal with testing, and just want their documents to work.

What I notice is that increased usage hasn’t raised any truly major issues. Yes, there have been corrections (see the ChangeLog for the detail), but they were mainly at the level of predictable issues: places that I’d not explored quite enough. I hope Overleaf will consider an in-place update to somewhere around the latest release: whilst the issues have been minor in the grand scheme, it would be good to get a reasonably bug-reduced version out there (I’m not claiming bug-free)!

So I’m seeing the release as in the end quite a big success: I’ve addressed the issues I knew about, got better testing, have cleaner interfaces and am already offering new features. My mind is therefore turning to v3.1: I have a list of issues to consider that I’d like to take for that release, plus I could pick off some others. I might of course not tackle all of these: I’m thinking starting over the Christmas period and looking to release in March/April 2022. By then of course we might be at v3.0.50, so it will also help to ‘reset’ the patch level!