[TYPO3-v4] Minutes from the 20th Skype meeting of the release 4.5 team

[Ernesto Baschny]

Hi people,

I missed to post the last weeks meeting minutes in time. But I managed
to get the info together and its available online:

http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v45-projects/wiki/Minutes_19th_Meeting_2010-11-22

Today we hold our 20th Skype meeting for the 4.5 release. This was the
last meeting before the beta2 release on Wednesday.

We were complete: Olly Hader (core team leader), Benni Mack (4.4 release
manager), Ben van't Ende (community manager), Steffen Kamper (4.5
technical leader) and Ernesto Baschny (4.5 release manager).

======================================================================
Release related
======================================================================

File abstraction layer (FAL)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

There was some activity since the release of beta1 in the FAL front.
Steffen met with the guys from WMDB (Mathias Schreiber, Peter Kühn and
Rupi Germann) and got the status update (after our release team meeting):

The sysext is almost finished, some minor details need to be adapted
only. The file uploader is part of it and also works (only needs some
skinnig and cosmetical fixes). Tomorrow there is a team meeting (also
with Ben) where the last stuff is discussed.

Tomorrow we'll see a RFC for the hooks which FAL will require from the
core to work and after that we'll have the new sysext "fal" which
provides the features. Then we can start testing it and discuss it with
a broader audience.

Pagetree
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Stefan Galinski finished the PHP part (abstract classes, using core
classes, etc). Everything is working very well already.

Completely missing is still the file tree, but Steffen things that once
the page tree is ready, the file tree can also be finished in time.
Ernesto mentioned that at worst we could ship the "new file tree" as an
extension later on TER even after the 4.5.0 release.

Extension manager
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Steffen worked hard on it, not yet 100% finished, but it will be
included in beta2. Some pending problems:

* exceptions in extdirect come only to the "console". No way to capture
exceptions yet.
* SOAP on TER misses one method to "login" the user
* When installing an extension with depedencies, those are opened in a
popup window with "closes" itself and refreshes the "opener". But now
the opener is "extJs" and this doesn't work anymore, but Steffen will
thing of something.
* Localization: also some details missing.

It already works with different repositories, Steffen tried it in this
scenario already. So you will be able to connect to TER and also to some
private repository to fetch extensions and updates.

Gridview
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ernesto had some contact with Thomas last week, where he said there will
be some RFCs soon. @Ernesto will contact Thomas about the current status.

Ben noticed that the usability of the be_layout tables is not yet good,
as it wasn't really working on his setup. Due to the current lack of
documentation it is difficult to test. Ernesto said that at most in
beta3 when features should have stabilized we should expect the teams to
work hard on "documentation" of the new features.

Workspaces
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Olly explained that there was not much action in the last week (only a
couple of bugs fixed in the WS team's svn repository. Tonight at 18h
there will be another meeting.

So the current state will be merged tomorrow night or shortly before the
beta2 release into current trunk (also the version "sysext", which is
now in the WS SVN repository)

SwiftMail
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Jigal continued working on the integration and found a way to get the
old "t3lib_utility_mail::mail()" method also use SwiftMail transporters.
Patch is pending in the core list ("RFC
16591":http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=16591)

DBAL
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Steffen asked about the status of the DBAL troubles we had in alpha3 and
beta1 (dbal auto-activating itself and the Extbase incompatibility).

Ernesto explained the situation:

* Since alpha3 dbal was auto-activating itself when using the Install
Tool (even if not in the 123-wizard anymore). This is not happening
anymore (also not on beta1)
* Idea is that dbal activates itself in step "0" and if the user on a
later step choses "mysql", it will deactivate itself again. This has to
be *tested* if it is working as supposed.
* The extbase incompatibility was due to the usage of "experimental"
DBAL support for sql_exec() function. DBAL now has a flag (since beta2)
in Ext.Manager to allow DBAL activated but to pass-through sql_exec()
calls directly to MySQL (without trying to parse them). This would allow
Extbase and DBAL to be working on the same installation even if you
cannot use the DBAL features (table re-mapping etc) with Extbase yet. So
no change is required in the Extbase code.

@Ernesto will ask Xavier about the current DBAL status and if anything
else is on his radar until 4.5 release.

t3editor
----------------------------------------------------------------------

There are some minor issues concerning styling in the t3editor and also
when loading two instances of it, which happens somewhere in a "very
hidden link" in the Web>Template tool. Steffen already reported it to
Tobias.

@Ernesto will ask Tobi what's the status here and if we expect any
activity on that matter in the coming weeks.

Performance
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ernesto started a call for a "performance round" with Rupi and
Christian. @Steffen will talk to Rupi later and see if he has the time
(he has offered to do the necessary benchmarks some time ago). Christian
Kuhn also offered to do some profiling comparing especially the FE
rendering of 4.4 and 4.5.

Ajax calls
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Steffen mentioned that lots of Ajax calls which fail return the current
TYPO3 error page (pure HTML) which won't get displayed anywhere. To see
it one has to call ajax.php manually. A better handling here would be
nice. Ernesto pointed at typo3/classes/class.typo3ajax.php which was
introduced as a standard layer to access TYPO3 ajax, and which has some
"error handling".

Benni noted that this class is still being actively used but relies on
Prototype, which we are not encouraging to use anymore anyway.

The use of typo3ajax is explaine in the "Core API
documentation":http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/core-documentation/doc_core_api/4.3.0/view/3/10/

For the future we should probably stick to ExtJS and ExtDirect.

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

Skinning team
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Skin team was kickstarted last friday. Lead by Steffen Gebert the
activity is already very high, the team members are motivated and work
has "started". It is a difficult road ahead, but we expect to see more
and more RFCs coming from this development in the near future.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 17h there is a meeting with design team (Lars,
Jens, Steffen K, and also Steffen Gebert) to also discuss the workflow.

We briefly went into the are of "which tracker to use in which
situation", as we have the "Design & Usability
tracker":http://forge.typo3.org/projects/usability/issues and the new
"Skin team tracker":http://forge.typo3.org/projects/skin/issues.
Basically the idea is to have every issue enter the "Design tracker" and
the Design team to manually push the "approved issues" to the Skin team
tracker.

For this to work it means that the leaders of both teams need to process
new issues very fast and respond in time in order not to block any
development.

Indexed Search
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The desired project didn't seem to have happened, since we haven't seen
any results yet. @Steffen will try to contact Dmitry about it again.

Intro Package
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ernesto needs to fix some issues with the Dump he made (late at
night...) for the beta1 release. The new sysext is called "workspaces"
(and not "workspace"), tt_news caching missing in the dump.

Lightbox
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ben asked about the "usability" of the lightbox feature. He was thinking
that the constant switch automatically made the lightbox feature enable
in the core.

Ernesto explained that it also required the javascript has to be loaded.

Ben wants to make sure the new features are "usable" out-of-the-box.
Steffen said he will write some buzz articles about individual features
later on.

Announcing beta2
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Since there was kind of a lack of response to the beta1, we will
announce the beta2 also through the announce mailing. @Olly will ask
Stucki to add Ernesto as an allowed sender and give Ernesto some
instructions about it.

.txt Files in root
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ben wants to change the README.txt files, which are very outdated and
several people already complained. Olly explained that the current
README.txt from the dummy-package (also intro package) comes from
"here":https://svn.typo3.org/Teams/Core/v4/Tools/Packaging/trunk/packaging/incoming/doc/common/README.txt
and is included in the package by the packaging scripts.

@Ben will find some guys to work on that text (using a Wiki) and we'll
probably have differnet README.txt files per package, and also one for
typo_src.

Schedule for this week
----------------------------------------------------------------------

* Workspaces team meeting, Monday 18h
* Design / Skin meeting, Tuesday 17h
* Release beta2, Wednesday "at some hour"



-- 
Ernesto Baschny
Core Developer V4 Team
Release Manager TYPO3 4.5

TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!
Get involved: typo3.org