[Typo3-dev] Spring cleaning in TER for "global" extensions ?

[Stephane Schitter]

Hello,

Now that spring has come in the north hemisphere, that days are getting 
longer and that Typo3 3.8 is almost ready, what about a bit of cleaning 
in the TER for global extensions ?

Let me explain the background.

The Typo3 packages now come with an expanded set of "system exts", which 
are going to be maintained with the core. Fine. However there are still 
"global exts" in the distribution (for example the beta for 3.8.0), 
which is fine as well -- except that one day we will want to remove them 
and let the user download them from the TER.
The only problem is that many of these global extensions are more 
up-to-date in the Typo3 standard packages than on the TER.

My proposal is to get the TER versions of these extensions at least to 
the same level as those found in the prepackaged Typo3 distributions. I 
know there are many important things to be done in the core and that 
cleaning is often low on the priorities, except that this work has no 
side effects (except bringing everything in line and even closing 
potential issues), and is real quick -- I have already done the analysis 
of what needs to be updated in TER.

I did a quick comparison of all global exts and their corresponding TER 
versions, you can have the details on this page [1] not included here 
for sake of shortness, but the overall results look quite scary to me: 
very old bugs are still found in the TER versions of some packages, and 
I initially thought only 1 or 2 exts was not in synch with TER when 
actually it is more than half of them.

The best situation should be where the TER versions are the same or more 
recent than the ones shipped with a Typo3 package, not the opposite as 
it is today (except for sysexts).

So the options are:
1. We do nothing, and leave it till later
2. We try to tidy TER with the most outdated extensions (I have isolated 
them in my list)
3. We try to tidy TER with all extensions from "global" scope so that we 
have this issue out of the way, and future prepackaged files of Typo3 
simply have to do a dump of the TER for this subset of extensions if you 
still want to ship them in the .tar.gz and .zip files.

I am happy to provide all the help I can -- except I cannot update the 
exts in TER myself, only the owners can do that.

Also I would like to mention I am no professional user of Typo3, I am 
just a hobbyist impressed by this software, but I am nevertheless 
willing to sponsor this cleaning work if that can help get it done !

Stephane

[1] http://www.frozenkiwi.net/typo3-diffs.html