[TYPO3-v4] Minutes from the 18th Skype meeting of the release 4.5 team

Tue Nov 16 01:10:48 CET 2010

Hi dear friends,

Today we hold our 18th Skype meeting for the 4.5 release. This was the
last meeting before the "feature freeze" (Wednesday = beta1).

We were almost complete: Olly Hader (core team leader), Benni Mack (4.4
release manager), Steffen Kamper (4.5 technical leader) and Ernesto
Baschny (4.5 release manager). Ben had no time today.

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Release 4.5 projects
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FAL = file abstraction layer
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The code sprint at WMDB this weekend was a great success. Present were
Dan Osipov, Ingmar Schlecht, Andreas Wolf, Mathias Schreiber, Peter
Kühn, Sebastian Fischer and Andi Gruenwald. See this article for
detailed information [1].

Steffen reported from his participation on Saturday: Team worked on a
GIT repository, which was not in Sync with current trunk. Peter will
work on getting it in sync and finally creating the necessary RFCs for
the core list (today, tomorrow).

Functionality is basically ready:

1. File Uploader (also for "non-FAL" usage), which does not require Flash
2. FAL as a new sysext (defining a new DB structure, an API for
accessing resources, an integration with TypoScript, backend rendering
in TCEforms and a file tree using extJS)
3. Migration path from tt_content + pages to "FAL" (work from Sebastian
Fischer, not yet complete)

Steffen gave a positive feedback: The result is very good, better than
expected. There is an active forge project listing all open issues [2]

[1] http://news.typo3.org/news/article/the-falcon-has-landed/
[2] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-fileabstractionlayer/issues

UTF-8 by default
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After a heated discussion in the core list around the pending patch,
Benni will finish up the work with Stucki this afternoon and have it
committed afterwards (got enough +1 already).

Michael Stucki also wants to tackle the "convert script" which will be
able to handle "90% of the cases", in time for the release of 4.5 (will
be added in beta2 or beta3).

Page tree
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This weekend Steffen worked wit Peter Foerger and Stefan Galinski on the
"page tree" implementation. Continuing the work from the T3UXW09 and the
refactoring started by Stefan the result was already a working code base:

* rendering,
* filtering,
* drag&drop,
* remembering state of collapsing

Some issues are still pending, and will be tackled one by one. At first
we will have it in the core as a "sysext" so that it can be tested and
further refined before we replace the current page tree completely
(which is the goal until the final release).

Work in progress can be followed in the forge SVN repository [3].

[3] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-extjstrees/repository

TCA tree
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Speaking of "trees" we discussed Steffen Ritters RFC 16336 [4] which
adds support for "MM" and "inline" to the TCA tree data provider. @Olly
will take a look at it later on, as he is currently in the "IRRE-mood"
anyway.

[4] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=16336

New Extension Manager
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Steffen already committed the splitting of classes and fixed one found
minor bug. Together with Markus Krause he did also some last fixes in TER.

There is a "Scheduler Task" to update repository, which only requires
three lines of code, using the "EM-API".

We discussed briefly the change of PRIMARY KEY of "cache_extensions"
table: Key used to be on "ext+version", it was changed
"ext+version+repository", because now the same extension could come from
different repositories. Steffen said the Install Tool is not able to
change the PRIMARY KEY because the "TRUNCATE" is not happening as
expected. He also added a "uid" to have small integer PRIMARY KEY,
Ernesto thinks this is not necessary if that uid is not used.

Steffen reported that most pending matters in the New EM from the Design
Team (Jens) have been solved. There are some minor CSS issues to be
tackled. The plan is to have the New EM commited in beta1 but having the
"old EM" still available. As soon as we have a stable New EM, we could
drop / remove the Old EM (beta3 maybe).

There is also a "Developer module" which enables interested persons to
see some statistics which are provided by the new API. We might consider
leaving it in core (when debug mode is enabled or if devIPmask matches).

Tonight or tomorrow we'll see the new RFC.

Workspaces
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The new Workspaces module is in the core, as a new Sysext, which depends
on Sysext "version". Development migrated from github to a SVN
repository at forge [5] which is easier to keep in Sync with our SVN.

The WS-Team will care about the WS module from here on. The plan is to
have the team being able to maintain the "workspace" and "version"
sysext by their own, in a process similar to the DBAL team: WS-team has
their own "+1" rule, and can commit without going through the core list.
The extensions will be updated when necessary and tagged in their
repository (like DBAL also does).

Olly reported that IRRE and Workspaces now also work for 1-n relations,
Olly just committed as FYI (no one will understand it anyways...).
Testbed is still the irre_tutorial extension (Hotel, Offer, Prices,
Seasons), which was updated in SVN / forge. It also contains unit tests
for the new fixes.

A creation from this fix is the new t3lib_utility_dependency, which is
an interface to be able to check for generic dependencies. Olly uses it
for IRRE, but it might be useful on other places as well.

[5] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-workspaces/repository

Super search
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We had a lot of progress for the "super search" project, which was kick
started by Mick in the T3UXW09.

Jeff Segars took over the code some weeks ago and he was able to get the
beast running in current trunk. Codebase is not that bad and Jeff is
confident that we will be able to have this in for beta1. He'll continue
to work on it today and tomorrow, so we expect a RFC soon.

Searching will be available in a search field with auto-completion and
nicer syntax for selecting records. The jump to a page by "id" will
change from entering the ID to "#id", which makes it then also possible
to search for specific integers in the content.

Link validator
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It is ready and seems to be working, at least Tolleiv has reviewed it so
far. Steffen's test didn't work out yet, getting no results at all from
the extension. There is also no feedback from the module while doing its
work, and some warnings in the scheduler task. Steffen asks more people
to test it, code is available on forge [6].

[6] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-linkvalidator/repository

Grid view
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Joey and Thomas are working hard to finish up the "Grid View" for the
Web>Page backend module. Work in progress is merging current development
to our current trunk and finetuning the Wizard. We might get a RFC with
the feature tonight or tomorrow morning.

Flexform ACLs
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Steffen asked to review this nice RFC 16334 [7] from Kai Vogel. Code is
very good and feature is amazing (allows to set ACL permissions and
hiding fields from flexform sections, e.g. Plugin configuration (used by
most modern extensions, e.g. tt_news). Ernesto promised to make a
review, in fact he just chatted with Kai about it (he'll provide a new
patch tomorrow morning).

[7] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=16334

Flash message queue
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Steffen talked to Ingo Renner (who was lying on a beach in Cancun) about
the Flash message queue: rendering happens "too late". Steffen already
committed an API addition to ease the process of using the pageRenderer
by backend modules (method ->render()). He also applied that
simplification to most backend modules from the core to set an example
on how to use it (see RFC 16383 [8]).

[8] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=16383

======================================================================
Organizational
======================================================================

Intro Package in French
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Plan is to have a French language Intro Package for 4.5. ben will
contact punkt.de to get a vhost for the installation. Peter will care of
setting it up so that translators could start their work. This was not
done yet.

Skinnig team
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Skinning Team [9] is very alive and already starting doing its job under
Steffen Gebert's leadership. We already have 8 members, which are CSS
enthusiasts which were not active in the TYPO3 communinity until now. We
will welcome them as soon as everything is settled.

Work started on some issues already. Ernesto hasn't had a feedback from
the server team about a new virtual machine, so cron IT will provide the
necessary resource for this team: Individual TYPO3 instances where the
tasks can be worked on (having a "live demo" space and easy way of
making a SVN diff for core team members). This way the CSS guys don't
have to work with "local installations" or even know about GIT or SVN.

An article will be prepared next week by Ben / Ernesto.

[9] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/skin

Feature freeze
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We talked about what the "feature freeze" means, and this will be also
communicated to the teams and participants as soon as beta1 is out.

We want to finish up the tasks which are already included in beta1 and
and the major goal is to acomplish all projects from our Project Roadmap
[10]. We won't be starting new projects, of course. This means the
following projects might get follow-ups:

* FAL
* trees, page tree, abstract classes
* utf8
* Workspaces
* Super search
* t3lib_mail
* Backend design (skinning)
* DBAL (e.g  prepared searches everywhere)

Labels and localization stuff *must* be ready for beta2, so that the
translation teams can start working on that.

[10] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v45-projects/wiki/Projects

Schedule for the week
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* Release beta1 on Wednesday afternoon
* Next meeting next Monday 14h

Cheers,
Ernesto