[TYPO3-v4] Minutes of the 14th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

Wed Aug 24 09:54:27 CEST 2011

Hi dear TYPO3 community,

Here are the notes of the 14th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team.

The minutes are also available in the wiki of TYPO3 4.6:
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki/2011-08-24_-_Minutes_from_the_14th_meeting

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Minutes from the 14th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

The 4.6 release team meets weekly for a Skype discussion round on the 
current activities. If you find this report interesting or have some 
comment or question about a particular topic, don't hesitate to 
follow-up on the thread in the v4 mailing list.

On Monday, August 24th 2011 we held our 14th meeting with the following 
participants:

* Xavier Perseguers (4.6 Release Manager)
* Oliver Hader (Core Team Leader)
* Ben van't Ende (Community Manager)

Topics
============================

First of all, as you can easily spot, we seem to have "missed" some 
weekly meetings. But in fact with holidays we ended up being only two 
within the Release Team to be online for the meeting and as such our 
discussions were shorter and more informal. Part of this meeting was a 
way to "resynchronize" us with TYPO3 when we were off.

We started our meeting discussing a suggestion from Ben regarding 
"human-readable articles". We aim at writing less bullet-point feature 
articles and more human-readable texts, particularily for the upcoming 
RC1 and, of course, final release of TYPO3 4.6.0. In order to do so, we 
will have to prepare them more in advance and think about related 
articles and events such as release party, ... and making buzz. This 
should start within a month from now.

Card Layout
----------------------------

* Olly points out that this is faster but only after a while because 
every module still has to be rendered once before taking advantage of 
the high speed switch between module. This of course, cannot be prevented.
* We have had some kind of change of behaviour with the different 
modules "remembering" their previous state, which is better UX-wize 
except for a known issue, namely that the page tree was unsynchronized 
for different modules. But this has been tackled with in the mean time 
and now works as expected.

ExtJS 4
----------------------------

* The BLE project is thinking about migrating to ExtJS 4 but this 
targets TYPO3 4.7 and not 4.6 as feature freeze is over.

Form project
----------------------------

* While trying to fix coding guidelines (CGL) issues, Olly easily 
experienced a blank backend. This should be tackled with for the 
upcoming releases of TYPO3 4.6
* The security team should start reviewing the Form system extension to 
make sure it is ready to be used in production

[ *TODO* Security Team ] Review the system extension

This discussion led us to Quality Assurance:

Quality Assurance
----------------------------

* We have a Forge project for it: 
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/team-qualityassurance
* Christian is a lonely cowboy at the moment, Ben agrees that we should 
enlarge the team at some point
* Olly reported that we plan to have automatic unit tests when pushing a 
patch to Gerrit.

XLIFF
----------------------------

XLIFF is running smoothly and we did not have any report of problem with 
it. As such, this is a real success because our new translation server 
is now used for all TYPO3 releases.

What is still missing at the moment is a converter for LLXML files to 
XLIFF within extdeveval, as we already announced it a while ago. Olly 
pointed out that it could be useful to have the other way around as 
well, to allow developers to prepare XLIFF files and generate the 
corresponding LLXML files for older TYPO3 releases if their extension is 
to be used there as well.

[ *TODO* Xavier/Dominique ] LLXML <-> XLIFF converter for extdeveval
[ *TODO* Michael/Infrastructure Team ] Discuss what to do next with the 
Pootle infrastructure

Next bug day
----------------------------

The next bug day has been announced and Steffen G. suggested to extend 
it as a bug week-end, with "performance" in mind. This has to be 
discussed in the mailing list. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend 
much of this bug day/week-end because of a whole week-end of concerts.

[ *TODO* Xavier ] Assign bugs to beta2

Link Validator
----------------------------

The Link Validator is not integrated as submodule as other system 
extensions (DBAL, Extbase, Fluid, Workspaces). We discovered that the 
project team has a slightly wrong workflow, namely working on the 4.5 
branch but not on master.

Once again, here is the workflow for external projects included in Core 
(DBAL, Extbase, ...) either as submodule or, as this is the case 
currently for Link Validator, manually merged:

* One branch for each TYPO3 release
* The "HEAD" of a branch is used when packaging a release and (except 
for Link Validator), the packaging script creates a corresponding tag
* master is used for Core master, namely TYPO3 4.6
* No new features after feature freeze on master or older branches, that 
is *NEW FEATURES ARE NOW FORBIDDEN* (see also next heading)
* We cannot and do not want to play big brother and we rely on the team 
to respect these rules.

We suggest to fix bugs on master and backport them to older branches but 
this is up to the project team. While reviewing patches on Gerrit, I 
discovered that patches merged to master were not always backported to 
older branches although the commit message clearly stated that it 
targeted older releases as well.

[ *TODO* Olly ] Have a look at Extbase as a one-time check
[ *TODO* Ernesto ] Can we somehow use your patch summary script to send 
reminder emails to the Core list when a patch was not yet merged to 
older branches?

New features
----------------------------

We already have a few new features pending for review in Gerrit, or even 
ready to be merged. We could create a branch for TYPO3 4.6 and leave 
master open for new features (4.7) from now on. But we don't want to do 
so because until the release of TYPO3 4.6.0, we should concentrate on 
fixing bugs and not implementing new (cool) features.

However, this is dangerous to leave pending patches in Gerrit and even 
more when they have enough reviews because it can easily happen that 
some Core dev does not pay enough attention and clicks the "merge" 
button, resulting in new features being part of 4.6.

As such, we think that it could be wise to create a branch but not for 
4.6 but for "next TYPO3 version after master", leaving master being the 
official branch for the upcoming 4.6 version. This will allow new 
features to be committed while still concentrate on fixing bugs for 4.6.

Misc
----------------------------

[ *TODO* Ben ] Discuss with Søren to know the deadline of the release 
article
[ *TODO* Ben ] General idea on how to present 4.6 on typo3.org? Idea 
from Olly: just like apple.com for Lion
[ *TODO* ] Integrate Pootle in the release article => screencast?

Dates
============================

* TYPO3 4.6 beta2 on August 30th 2011
* Final Release of TYPO3 4.6.0 on October 25th 2011

Next steps
============================

If you feel interested in a particular project or task, please reply on 
the list or directly get in contact with Xavier Perseguers as Release 
Manager of TYPO3 4.6.

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Cheers
Xavier

-- 
Xavier Perseguers
Release Manager TYPO3 4.6

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