[TYPO3-v4] Minutes of the 15th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

[Xavier Perseguers]

Hi dear TYPO3 community,

Here are the notes of the 15th 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/2011-09-12_-_Minutes_from_the_15th_meeting

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Minutes from the 15th meeting

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, September 12th 2011 we held our 15th meeting with the 
following participants:

* Xavier Perseguers (4.6 Release Manager)
* Oliver Hader (Core Team Leader)
* Benjamin Mack (4.4 Release Manager)
* Ben van't Ende (Community Manager)

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

After the BLE meeting from last week, the release team met again to 
discuss a few topics.


Extension Manager
----------------------------

Francois and Xavier worked on the "new" EM from Friday to Saturday 
(September, 9th - 10th). This code sprint was focused on getting rid of 
a few annoying bugs or UX oddities. The led to a few patches in Gerrit 
which got reviewed by other community members.

As announced in previous minutes (first time with "our very first 4.6 
meeting":http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki/2011-03-14_-_Minutes_from_the_1st_meeting), 
we aim at having only one Extension Manager. Currently, the (re-) 
activation of the legacy Extension Manager module is done by configuring 
the "em" extension itself.

* Olly suggested to move activation of old/new EM in user settings
* Benni suggested to move that to localconf.php instead

As we would like to have only one EM, we will come with a patch to move 
this setting to localconf.php and make the new EM the default, official, 
extension manager module to be used. This will allow us to further 
refactor it without having to worry about possible breaks introduced in 
legacy Extension Manager. This is a natural enhancement started by TYPO3 
4.5 LTS.

[ *TODO* Xavier ] Create a patch for the EM activation in localconf.php


ReST
----------------------------

ReST (actually should be written "reST") stands for reStructuredText (in 
*one* word). This is the suggested new documentation format.

* Olly: The BLE project needs to choose a documentation format as well
* The new documentation format should be fairly easy to install and to use
* All: We should start using it ourselves to gather experience

Read more on http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html#user-documentation


Caching Framework
----------------------------

Since TYPO3 4.6, the Caching Framework cannot be "deactivated" anymore. 
As you know, since it was first introduced in TYPO3 4.3, it _could_ be 
activated. Now it is used an cannot be deactivated anymore.

We got feedback from people unhappy with this because they did not like 
the Caching Framework. Actually this comes from an analyze Ruppi once 
did for TYPO3 4.3 in comparison to TYPO3 4.2 and he tracked the 
bottleneck down to the Caching Framework.

If you did not notice it, Christian Kunz worked on lot on Caching 
Framework for both FLOW3 and v4 and enhanced it a lot by importing lots 
of missing features from extension enetcache. Steffen G. found some 
bottlenecks as well and over the past snapshot releases, the Caching 
Framework evolved a lot and is now considered stable and production 
ready, finally being a must have for every TYPO3 4.6 installations.

[ *TODO* ] Discuss how to prevent clearing all caching framework tables 
"blindly" when using the "Clear all caches" menu entry. This is 
counterproductive when an extension relies on CF to not reinvent the 
wheel but would like to actively pruning old entries using a clever 
business logic.


More reviews
----------------------------

[ *TODO* Olly ] Ask Jeff Segars if he can do some reviews for 4.6 the 
same way he did for 4.5


Quality Insurance
----------------------------

As already said, we would like to have better quality deliveries and we 
thought about 3 levels:

1) If something is modified and merged, post reviews should be done to 
ensure it did not introduce bugs or regression
2) We have to better use the Continuous Integration server (ci.typo3.org 
hosted by DKD) => ideally we would like to have a basic TYPO3 website 
(introduction package?) with Selenium tests and unit tests running 
automatically
3) We need a Testing team with a bunch of people "clicking here and 
there" and actually "using" TYPO3 for real. For this we need a catalog 
of tests (test link validator, create a new CE, ...)

[ *TODO* Olly ] Discussion of CI with Christian Trabold


Press Release
----------------------------

[ *TODO* Xavier ] Get in touch with Ben to discuss this topic


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

* TYPO3 4.6 beta3 on September 20th 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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