[TYPO3-core] Proposal for the upcoming Roadmap and LTS

[Michael Stucki]

Hi everyone,

this weekend I met with Benjamin and Oliver in Stuttgart to discuss the
structure of the CMS core team and the upcoming roadmap.

We spent a major part of our meeting to review the whole discussion that
started after Bennis proposal in October, and tried to identify the
problems and fears that need to be resolved.

Looking at the huge discussion, there were a lot of similar views:

1. There is a high demand for another LTS version

Only a few people have put this in question, whereas the only reason
against another LTS seems to be lack of resources. We have tried to
address that further down in this text.


2. Only six months to upgrade from 4.5 LTS to 6.2 LTS is too short

This was first brought up by Steffen Müller but a lot of people seem to
agree to it. We see the need for this and would like to address it by
extending the lifetime of TYPO3 4.5 LTS for 6 more months. That yet
depends on Ernesto who is the release manager and needs to agree with
it, but it looks like he will do so.


3. Don't backport _every_ fix into every supported version

This was brought up by Mario Rimann and I think it's a major point of
the discussion where people talk about different needs:
As an end user, I will most likely not care if some tiny change is
backported to 4.5 LTS right now, however I do care if the blocker that
prevents it to work with some new browser version is fixed. Therefore,
we should clarify the maintenancy periods and separate between

a) regular small bugfixes
b) priority bugfixes & security fixes

We think that a release should receive every bugfix at the time when it
it is new (during the stable phase, 1st 6 months). But after that, there
is no need to backport every change into a version. Only priority
bugfixes (blockers, important issues) and security fixes (of course!)
should be required for backporting. Other issues can still be backported
optionally, we don't want to exclude this possibility of course...


4. Have the TYPO3 Association cover (some of) the costs for maintaining
an LTS version

There were several feedbacks from people who seem to expect this. In
fact, the maintenance costs are partly covered already as we do have
budgets for important bugfixes. It is not clearly marked as a budget for
LTS maintenance and it also wasn't used very often during this year.
Also Oliver spent a large amount of time working on LTS releases, which
has partly been covered by his team leader budget.

We will check if it is possible to modify our budget application to
clearly address LTS maintenance, but even if not, the current
application could cover some of these costs.


5. The 6 months release cycle should be kept

Again, there was only the lack of resource that seems to speak against a
6 month release cycle, but other cycles would have their drawbacks too.
Therefore we think that it's good to keep it like it is.


6. Next major version / version numbering

We realized that it is not relevant right now if there will be a 7.0 and
when. Both is possible but depends on factors that we can't foresee yet.

Therefore we decided to skip the whole part from our proposal, and
instead refer to 6.2 + 1, +2, etc. when naming versions.


Please take a look at the following sheet which explains how we propose
the next versions to be maintained:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AscRLPA1pqfQdEpUQVFVSjBQN1g5QnBQbTR5MmlJTXc


Next steps:
- We will write a proposal document that incorporates the points that
have been covered here.
- We will send this draft to the EAB of the TYPO3 Association and will
ask for their advise on it.
- We would like to publish a finalized version very soon, possibly
before the release of TYPO3 6.0...

Greetings to all of you!
Benni, Oliver & Michael

Am 06.10.2012 16:05, schrieb Benjamin Mack:
> To all the contributors out there,
> Olly, Michi, Helmut and me sat together during the T3CON and thought
> about the next releases, after taking all the input from the community
> we got from the last weeks and months. We made the following proposal
> that we think fits best. BUT we want and need your feedback so we can
> fine-tune and modify this proposal. Once we have a consensus I'd like to
> publish a news article in the next weeks, and put up these points on the
> Roadmap page of TYPO3.org so people know what they can expect.
> 
> 
> We want to make the following suggestion:
> 
> 1) We really want to stay in the 6-month-release cycle
>  * it displays activity in our product
>  * it is easier to get changes / features in
>  * less discussions whether to merge features into existing stable branches
>  * it has been proven to be a good way in the last 3 years.
> 
> 
> 2) We want another LTS version
>  * Depending on the criteria of a project, there is a high demand for
> both (bleeding-edge features as well as long-term commitment)
>  * Therefore we see a need to keep up with the LTS versions
>  * A new LTS version shouldn't overlap too much with the existing one,
> which will expire in Jan 2014
> 
> 
> 3) Maintenance lifetime
>  * Currently we support every release for 18 months, except the LTS.
> This results in maintaining 4 to 5 versions at a time, which is a lot of
> work for the Release Teams.
>  * Therefore we suggest to only support the latest stable release and
> its predecessor, starting with the release of 6.0 - which means approx.
> 12 months for each version
>  * There would be no change to the LTS maintenance lifetime (3 years).
>  * The current stable release would get as much bug fixes as possible
> (same as right now)
>  * Other releases (predecessor, LTS) = get important and security fixes
> (similar to how we deal with 4.5 right now)
> 
> 4) We don't see the need for defining 7.0 version - yet!
>  * We want to embrace 6.x just as we embraced and developed 4.x further.
>  * We want stable and consistent 6.x versions to focus on
> backwards-compatibility, maintenance and a high-quality product.
>  * If it makes sense after a couple of releases to make breaking changes
> or add large features, we are still able to raise the version number to
> 7.0, but this is not the case yet :)
> 
> 
> As a result, we propose the following schedule for the next versions:
> 
> TYPO3 6.0
>  * originally scheduled for October 2012, now postponed to November 2012
>  * having all the goodies in there (Namespaces, FAL)
> 
> TYPO3 6.1
>  * Release in April 2013 (just 5 months to keep up with the release cycle)
>  * It is just before T3DD13, to open up development for 6.2
> 
> TYPO3 6.2
>  * Release in October 2013
>  * Marked as the LTS version, supported until October 2016.
> 
> TYPO3 6.3
>  * Roughly scheduled for April 2014
> 
> Apart from that we don't want to announce a 6.4, 6.5 or even 7.0
> versions (yet) because we don't really know yet where we will stand with
> TYPO3 CMS and where Neos will be in early 2014. Let's not promise
> anything that we cannot keep right now.
> 
> Please think about it and tell us if you can agree with it via "+1/-1".
> If you disagree, also tell us why, so we can try to improve the proposal.
> 
> Michael, Olly, Helmut, Benni.
> 


-- 
Michael Stucki
TYPO3 Core Team member

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