On Sep 18, 2026, at 10:10 AM, Douglas Fischer <fischerdouglas@gmail.com> wrote:
I’d like to suggest—or encourage—the release of an alpha version of v4.
We did that a few years ago (!). Yes, it's likely time to do that again.
It might seem silly, or like I’m asking too much. But I believe that publishing it as an official release would encourage more people to get hands-on with this version. That would generate more feedback regarding potential edge cases. It might even help reveal that what initially seemed like an edge case is actually something more significant.
Sure. For edge cases, we've been doing a lot of AI analysis in the background. We spent a large amount of time earlier this year fixing pretty much every issue we could find before other people noticed them. The result is that instead of getting swamped with AI reports, we've received maybe 10 reports from other people. So that helps a lot.
I’ve had my share of attempts. I was excited at first. But I got stuck, and when I tried sharing my questions and problems with people known for their FreeRadius expertise, the responses were quite discouraging: - "Give it up, that’s never going to happen!" And things like that.
That makes me sad. :( FreeRADIUS can be hard to use, but it can do just about anything. Which unfortunately can make it hard to use. The good news is that v4 cleans up all of the oddities which were in v3. So it should be much easier to use. And, it has _obsessive_ documentation on just about everything.
I have no idea how much extra effort is involved in creating a v4 alpha release on GitHub. I’m sure there *would* be extra work due to the resulting impact— —more users getting stuck on things like "How do I do X in v4 when I used to do it this way in v3?" and so forth. But perhaps that’s exactly what’s needed to strengthen the case for v4.
A new release isn't that hard. What's very useful is for people to download it, try it, and report back with what's good / bad / etc. I'll also say that InkBridge is working on a suite of tools which will help people better manage FreeRADIUS. We're doing a webinar tentatively set for October 29. I'll send out an announcement shortly when the content and date is finalized. Alan DeKok.