[TYPO3-dev] Too much changes?

[Ingmar Schlecht]

Hi Dimitri,

Dimitri Tarassenko wrote:
> On 4/8/06, Franz Koch <typo3 at fx-graefix.de> wrote:
>>> I am personally annoyed by the versioning system as a new
>>> default-please-lets-have-more-complexity-layer in the system. It seems
>>> more like a feature for theoritical purposes than for useful real-world
>>> use. I guess 95% of typo3 installations would never use this feature.
>>> And the rest is enterprise purpose where staging servers seem the better
>>> option.
>> I think it is needed for workspaces. Anyway I'd also prefer to be able
>> to activate/deactivate versioning and workspaces as they are not
>> neccessary for every project and only cause overhead.
> 
> +1. One of the main reasons I am not upgrading the production to 4.0
> and don't plan to in the foreseeable future. I am also not planning to
> build new stuff on 4.0 just yet. I already have rteHTMLarea on 3.8.1,
> our own mass email product integrated instead of direct_mail, and I
> don't care too much for workspaces - they work half-way anyway.

That's up to you whether or not you want to use workspaces, but
personally I think it's quite a useful and well integrated feature, but
I think it's reasonable not to start offering it to big customers as
early as now, because it is indeed a complicated feature that might just
need some time till 4.1 to be fully working.

But even apart from workspaces, 4.0 contains so many useful new stuff
just out of the box, that I would definitely go for it when building a
new site.

> So, (the question for core developers) what's the big plan for 3.8.x
> branch - is it going to be supported? Will anyone backport bugfixes
> from 4.x branch to it? And if yes, then for how long?

Not bugfixes, but security fixes will be provided as patch level
releases of the 3.8 branch.

Actually, when you look at the ChangeLog from 3.8 to 4.0, you'll see
that about 80% were just bugfixes. Imagine the enormous workload of
backporting all that to 3.8! And after all we want to touch the 3.8
branch as little as possible, so nothing breaks when people upgrade from
say 3.8.1 to 3.8.2 for having security fixes.

Now, you can argue that 4.0 contains some new features that might not
work 100% stable or don't integrate perfectly with old extensions etc,
but I think that's alright and you can just ignore those new features if
you don't need them.

> P.S. Let's see how many answers like "why don't you do it yourself?" I
> am going to get;))

Well, that is indeed a valid question. For example for 3.7 Peter
Niederlag asked if we are going to have some patch level releases and
volunteered to help. He got CVS access to that branch back then, and did
it! This is the fun part of open source!

cheers,
Ingmar