[TYPO3-v4] Minutes from the 25th meeting of the release 4.5 team

[Ernesto Baschny]

Hi guys,

happy New Year everybody!

Today we hold our 25th meeting for the 4.5 release, this time on Friday.
Pace is accelerating! We used Big Blue Button this time instead of Skype.

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

Steffen first summarized the action of the last weeks where Ernesto was
away.

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Packaging and beta3
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The activity was very low and it was very difficult to reach involved
people during that time. Steffen feeling was that we shouldn't do
releases around Christmas anymore for that reason. At the end, beta3 was
released with Olly helping out on the packaging. The documentation
Ernesto has given Steffen was valuable and @Ernesto should integrated
that packaging document into SVN as a resource.

For the beta3 release, nobody from the the Workspaces team was
available, so Steffen did the merge and tagging on their behalf.

Packaging 4.4 intro package also had some troubles, because 4.4 IP now
has a branch and the packaging scripts needed to be adapted, which Benni
did.

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Current status of 4.5
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Most features are finalized, there are still plenty of "tiny bugs" open.
Ernesto mentioned 48 issues with Target "4.5.0" on Mantis. But this list
is probably not up-to-date: Some issues are not mentioned, and some
issues are not relevant for 4.5 anymore. Ernesto will try to prioritize
the open issues still.

All stdWrap'ization and its optimization is finally finished. Huge work
by Joey and the helping hands!

The work on labels and CSH for the TCEforms for the new pages and
tt_content layout was kickstarted by Ingo, Jeff and Mark. Jeff will do
some work on it on this weekend.

The "Redirect from FE to Install Tool" problem ("RFC
#16172":http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=16172) fix not reproducible by
the release team, but the fix should be ok. Ernesto noted that the fix
restores the old behaviour from before the time of the Exceptions. Since
it fixes the issue on the reporters side, it should be the way to go.

Jigal fixed some issues concerning the mailing functions. Thanks!

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Design Team meeting / Tooltips
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There was a meeting with the Design and Skin team yesterday. The most
important discussed topic were the new tooltips. The result is already a
patch from Steffen Gebert in the core list. Ben asked about the option
of switching it off. Ernesto argued that there is no other application
(desktop) that allows you to turn it off. Ben mentioned that he wants to
turn it off because he finds it too obtrusive. But this is exactly the
issue that needs to tackle: Make it less intrusive.

Steffen is already working together with the Usability team (Jens) to
get it right. It will work more or less like this:

* on hover, after the current short delay => popup tooltip
* if focus is on the label *or* inside the tooltip, keep the tooltip open.
* on mouse moving ouside the tooltip (or the label) + "very short time",
remove tooltip (currently it "stays" for 3s, which is considered the
most obtrusive aspect).

Ernesto mentioned that we need to keep the tooltips present even on
mouse movements, because there might be a link *inside* the tooltip,
which makes our tooltips a bit different than the ones from other apps.

Steffen also mentioned that we could include a switch in the BEfunc
method that creates the tooltips to *not* generate them if the
sysext:context_help is not installed.

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

Jens went over the new EM with Steffen and all wishes were already
included in the EM repositories trunk (not yet in core's trunk). Steffen
did a lot of work on the last few days (again). "Follow the
activity":http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-em/activity.

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Open issues, Core team responsibility
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ben started the discussion about "shaking up" the core team members so
that they take some time to invest in the last efforts for the 4.5
release. After all, this is a very special release - with long term
support. Ben already discussed it with Stucki. We need to see more
cooperation from all core team members. @Ernesto will sum up the most
important issues still pending and initiate a "call for help".

Steffen doesn't see many huge blockers. Benni expressed his fear about
some major open issues (missing features in the EM, using the new
Pagetree with TemplaVoila, the new TCA labels inconsistency with list
view, etc). Ernesto and Steffen acknowledged the concern and will try to
tackle the most important issues together with the responsible teams
(there is not much time left). To help, Ernesto asked @Benni, @Olly and
@Ben to provide an "informal" list of what they think is still "major"
and open.

@Ernesto will generate a list of issues, categorize them in the bug
tracker and provide a perma-link so that we can work upon them and maybe
even find some people we can pay to work on them.

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Link validator
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Olly will take a look at the link validator repository to see its
quality and if we will keep it in RC1. There seemed to be very high
activity on that area on the latest days, so it might turn out good!

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TCEform sprint next week
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Olly mentioned that there will be a TCEform code sprint during the next
week (Andreas Wolf, Olly Hader and others). This is the continuation of
the project started 2 years ago, where TCEforms should be at the end
refactored. This is not yet in core, and it makes more sense to have it
commited on the *start* of a new release (as soon as trunk is branched
for 4.6 development), because it is such a crucial and central part of
TYPO3). So this work will go in 4.6.

But Olly might consider taking one or two days of that sprint (if the
TCEform part works out faster than 5 days) to work on pending issues for
the 4.5 release. Ernesto suggested at least using the Friday, because it
is an official Bug Day where more people will also be available for
Reviewing.

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renderInverted FYI change
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Ingo Renner commited FYI #16857 with the label optimizations. It also
included a new feature to "renderInverted" a checkbox (so that "no
cache" could be rendered as "use cache" instead). Benni demonstrated the
inconsistency that this generated (editing that same fields through the
List module for example), and we all agreed to revert that.

@Ernesto did that already, and instead of a big reversal he managed to
revert only the "renderInverted" part of the patch. Further discussions
and solutions are welcome.

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4.5 already "in production"
----------------------------------------------------------------------

ben is using it already using 4.5 (current trunk) in production and it
works well. Benni is also producing a new site with it, using current
trunk and will get live in February after the release.

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

Not much changed. There is a meeting of the team scheduled for next
Monday, Ernesto asked about the Caching feature, and Benni will ask
about the current status by then. The test-bed for Workspaces is a
server (workspaces.typo3projects.org), @Olly will send Ernesto some
credentials to check it out.

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Donate nag screen
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Lars had done a suggestion on how it could look like, and we discussed
it again. We agreed that this should be the way to go. Putting it in
"About > Modules" will make it prominent. Steffen noted that
About>Modules is an useless module for the startup of TYPO3 anyway, but
due to the lack of a "Dashboard", this is currently the best we have. An
alternative would be About>TYPO3, but that would need some styling.

So Ben will show the new Donate box to the steering comment, and if
agreed upon, he will coordinate with the Skin Team on how to get it
integrated.

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plupload
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Ben wanted to at least integrate plupload from the FAL project in 4.5,
but it probably won't happen. There is plenty of work to do on it,
Sfeffen already did some investigations on the code from Peter Kühn.
Since no one else is working on it and Steffen has other priorities, we
can only finish that if someone volunteers.  @ben will connect Steffen
with Christian Müller, maybe he can work on it (has ExtJS and JavaScript
expertise from the v5 team).

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RC2?
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Ben asked if we will have a RC2: Ernesto explained that we'll have RC1
as planned next week (Wednesday) and on the days to follow we will
decided if another RC2 is needed (a week later). Most probably we will
have it.

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README files
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We had the plan to work on the README files (to make them up-to-date)
via Wiki, but it turns out not to be so practical. So Ben will
coordinate directly with Olly to get them ready and included for 4.5.

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Release date coming = Communication needed
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Article
------------------------

Release date is coming shortly (26th January). So we need to start to
initialize the communication about it. E.g. by preparing an article.
Ernesto mentioned that T3N already asked him to write an article about
4.5 in German for the next edition. Ben prefers that Ernesto writes the
article in English so that this is the official article that all press
channels can grab and make use of. T3N could also use it and translate
it to German. Ernesto will contact Jan about that. Ernesto will try to
prepare the English article during the next week.

Release Notes
------------------------

We will also have Release Notes like we had in 4.4 (and 4.3) with
screenshots. Ernesto will work on that and re-use many of the already
existing text snippets from the Release Notes of Alpha and Beta releases
in the wiki.

Release Party
------------------------

Ben also asked about a "Release party", like "Drupal
did":http://www.drupal7releaseparty.org/. No reaction yet, but everybody
found it a cool idea.

typo3.org
------------------------

Ben also mentioned that a new new start page for typo3.org for the next
release is already sketched. We will need a new Slogan for the next
release. Team should think about something until next Monday.

Screencasts
------------------------

Ernesto mentioned "Drupal's 7 release
screencast":http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0. We should have something like
that. Maybe ask Jens about it (offered to do it once for 4.3). Also a
collegue of Benni has expertise on that area. Ben will ask them.

"Official" Hash-Tag
------------------------

We decided on a Twitter Hash-Tag for the release => #typo3lts.

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Next steps
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Steffen commented that there was not much feedback after the beta3, due
to many people being still on holiday. On Monday most people restart
their work but will probably be busy with own matters before turning
again to the TYPO3 community.

We will nevertheless release RC1 on next Wednesday, following our
"Release
Plan":http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v45-projects/wiki/Release_Plan.
This will be a snapshot that we might consider for a release. If this
snapshot is not yet stable enough, work continues and we will then
release a second RC2 (on the following week). This will then be the
final snapshot before the grand release of 4.5.0 which will happen on
26th January.

Next Meeting will take place on Monday 14h.

Cheers,
Ernesto

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

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