[TYPO3-dev] not amused...

[Reinhard Führicht]

One thought about the release cycles.

What would help a lot in my opinion is a built in update mechanism.
If there is a new version tagged as such in the SVN, the user is 
informed about that in the backend.
There should be a step by step update wizard checking the database 
structure, extension dependencies and finally importing the new source 
files. Of course before that there has to be some backup to prevent crashes.

I am thinking of a Mozilla kind of workflow. Extensions depend on a 
TYPO3 version and maybe a PHP version. These two settings should be 
mandatory for extensions. The highest possible version of TYPO3 to be 
entered in dependencies should be the current version.

This has some obvious effects:

- Extension authors are forced to provide working extensions for every 
new TYPO3 version
- Release cycles will be shorter because bugfix releases can be 
distributed much faster (4.2.x)
- New features can be developed separately and when finished be released 
with a new main version. (4.x)

Update mechanisms are included (AFAIK) in Wordpress and Magento and seem 
to work quite well.

Agencies who don't want to automatically update the core, can go on like 
they do now, disable automatic updates and do it manually.

Reinhard

ben van 't ende [netcreators] schrieb:
> Hi Steffen,
> 
> Your concerns are on the monitor. We will have some talks about this in 
> the Steering Committee. Especially the release cycle is one. I am in 
> favor of an Ubuntu kind of release cycle.
> 
> gRTz
> 
> ben
> 
> 
> 
> Steffen Gebert wrote:
>> Hi Francois,
>>
>> thans for your answer!
>>
>>> What would really improve the situation would be if we released versions
>>> more often. If you knew that you just had to wait 6 months for new
>>> features, it would be less of a heartbreak than a 18 months wait. We
>>> dearly wanted to release 4.3 much earlier, but it didn't happen for a
>>> whole lot of reasons. Manpower, again, is one of them.
>> Yes, I really think shorter release cycles would improve TYPO3 (and 
>> it's developement) a lot!
>>
>>>> Nevertheless I have the same feelings about factions of core
>>>> developers (kind of "ignoring" other factions or often only chalking
>>>> up missing documentation).
>>>
>>> I feel personnally addressed by that remark, as I have often sent
>>> reminders about missing documentation. Maybe you feel that documentation
>>> is not important. That's not my point of view. There are already many
>>> things which are not documented at all or not properly. At least I try
>>> to keep track of what new features get in and make sure these are
>>> documented.
>>
>> Documentation is very important, of course! I was really happy to see 
>> your service documentation and immediately started implementing an own 
>> login service (checking weather a user has paid his setup fee after X 
>> months).
>>
>> What I had in mind during writing these lines were postings, where 
>> answers only containing sth. like "there's no documentation with your 
>> patch, so -1" and postings from other people like "documentation will 
>> be added tomorrow", where nobody objected (and I have a feeling to see 
>> tendencies).
>>
>> So nothing against documentation - IMHO a docu has to be submitted 
>> with patches (which need docu)!
>>
>> Steffen
> 
>