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

[Marcus Krause]

Rupert Germann schrieb am 06/23/2009 10:31 PM Uhr:
> 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?

or in other words:
What's worth to potentially break the stable branch of TYPO3.

To be clear, I really like to get performance improvements in TYPO3.
But, to be honest, I really want to have a stable branch.


>From the user's perspective:
A user/admin that is upgrading from 4.2.0 to 4.2.1 does not expect
things to be broken afterwards and therefore won't check any possible
functionality of his setup afterwards.
A user that is upgrading from 4.2 to 4.3 "expects" that something might
break and will do proper testing before/afterwards.


>From the developer perspective:
- do least necessary code changes
- not every bug is worth to fix
- every bugfix exposes a risk to break something no matter how well it
is tested before

A performance "bugfix" might be a single line one but also a huge bunch
of loc. To get a common rule I would treat every performance "bugfix"
the same and suggest that they are only to be applied to minor releases
and above.

The system works for every user. A performance "bugfix" will only make
it run faster. That's good but it does not fix an error, it just
improves usability. But we do risk that something is seriously broken
afterwards.

Nobody's perfect and every modified line of code increases the
probability that you introduce a bug.

Don't risk it!


Marcus.


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