[TYPO3-dev] Are performance improvements part of maintaince releases?

[Rupert Germann]

hi,

again:
Are performance improvements part of maintaince releases?

or in other words: 
is a function that makes 50 identical sql requests when rendering a page a
bug?

the last discussions about this questions in the core list showed that we
don't have a consensus on this issue.

Current cases:
http://lists.netfielders.de/pipermail/typo3-team-core/2009-June/027147.html
http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=11358

http://lists.netfielders.de/pipermail/typo3-team-core/2009-June/027185.html
http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=11317

the reasons for reverting 11358 and for preventing 11317 from being applied
to the 4_2 branch are:
(wildly citing from these 2 threads)
- "performance tuning is not part of maintainance releases."
- "There is no urgent need to improve the performance. It's just nice to
have."
- "the risk to break something is always higher than without a patch"
- "...I think we had some problems earlier with similar kinds of caches,
which produced unexpected results in some scenarios..."

OK, we have a release-workflow document but it doesn't say anything about
performance improvements:
http://typo3.org/teams/core/resources/release-workflow/

so argument 1 seems to be pointless. or I have overlooked something?

next point states that performance improvements are only a "nice-to-have"
thingy. Hmm, ok, matter of taste for some people, maybe. But what about the
people for them performance is a bit more crucial thing? holding back
performance related fixes in maintaince versions seems to ignore them and
their needs.  

and point 3 and 4 say that adding a patch could possibly break something.
uhmmm, yes that's true, indeed. We are humans and humans make mistakes
(remember 4.2.4). But is not adding obvious improvements a solution for
this problem?

Dudes, are we core-devs or are we sissies?! ;-)

We know what we are doing. 
We are able to say that adding a few lines of code that prevent a function
from bothering the database with 50 identical queries will NOT break
anything. We only have to read and test the code. 

And we're also able to say that enhancing TYPO3 4.2.x by a cache for an
expensive function which has been tested for almost a year now in TYPO3 4.3
will not break anything.

and while we are on it: 
let's also talk about other improvements in current (stable) versions. what
about this:
 
2009-06-02  Steffen Kamper  <info at sk-typo3.de>
        * reverted #9849 as this wasn't present in 4.2.0
        * Fixed bug #9849: edit-wideDocument was removed, bring it back
(from 4_2 branche changelog)

dropping "edit-wideDocument" was a bug! no question !
Will there be no chance to fix usability errors once the xx.0 version is
out?


let the flamewar begin 



greets
rupert



PS: at the end of this discussion I'd like to see a document which clarifies
which improvements are bugs and which are not.