[TYPO3-v4] Minutes from the 8th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

Xavier Perseguers xavier at typo3.org
Fri May 20 13:21:42 CEST 2011 

Hi dear TYPO3 community,

here are the notes of the 8th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team.

The minutes are also available in the wiki of TYPO3 4.6:
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki/2011-05-16_-_Minutes_from_the_8th_meeting

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Minutes from the 8th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

*May 16th, 2011*

The 4.6 release team meets weekly for a Skype discussion round on the 
current activities. If you find this report interesting or have some 
comment or question about a particular topic, don't hesitate to 
follow-up on the thread in the v4 mailing list.

On Monday, May 16th 2011 we held our 8th meeting with the following 
participants:

- Xavier Perseguers (4.6 Release Manager)
- Oliver Hader (Core Team Leader)
- Benjamin Mack (4.4 Release Manager)
- Ben van't Ende (Community Manager)

Topics
============================

We started our meeting by brainstorming on our feel of lack of activity 
in TYPO3 development. Of course development is going on and a few people 
are still quite active on providing patches and reviewing RFC's (many 
thanks) but anyway, we are forced to admit that there is objectively 
less activity going on "publicly".

It is of course obvious that this is related to the move to Git and 
Gerrit where RFC's are not posted to the Core mailing list anymore but 
are available for reading from http://review.typo3.org where anybody may 
answer to the authentication prompt by providing his/her typo3.org 
credentials (the ones used to report bugs and feature requests on Forge 
or to manage extension keys on typo3.org).

Although this reviewing system is very efficient and basically allow 
anybody to easily give +1 by reading and/or testing (now mapped to "Code 
Review" and "Verified" respectively), we all miss the sometimes informal 
way of reviewing patches and discuss changes we used to have in the Core 
mailing list. Ideally, we would like Gerrit to post to the mailing list 
in order for anybody to easily follow "what's going on". A suggestion is 
pending in Forge [1] and it seems the main obstacle is as usual manpower 
but in the meantime, we suggest you subscribe to some email-based feed 
by configuring notification in "Settings / Watched Projects" in Gerrit.

Olly pointed out that the move to Git instead of Subversion implies to 
take time to configure one system (using the tutorial on [2]) and that 
many community users did not yet "make the switch". As the tutorials are 
now proven to be complete, we are confident you will take the few 
minutes needed to (re-) configure your TYPO3 environment and your 
different auto-update scripts. Do not hesitate to post to one of your 
preferred mailing list to ask for help if needed.

Benni suggested to plan a special meeting with the release team and a 
few other core team members to make sure we ourselves "master" Git and 
Gerrit workflows. Finally, we will ask the server management team to 
redirect the "403 authentication failed" page you get when canceling the 
authentication prompt on Gerrit to redirect to some landing page on 's 
wiki where people would be guided by a step-by-step tutorial. Ben and 
Olly will take care of preparing this wiki page.

Form project
----------------------------

According to Ben and a discussion we had with Patrick, leader of the 
Form project [3], it should be ready by now and will hopefully be 
integrated soon into Core. Ben will get in touch with Patrick to plan this.

XLIFF
----------------------------

Project XLIFF [4] aims at replacing the way we deal with localization 
within TYPO3 by a better, state-of-the-art, approach. This project was 
kickstarted by Dominique but he now needs some help to push it forward. 
We would like to integrate his work as soon as possible and plan to 
backport this feature to 4.5 LTS if it proves to be stable and 
well-integrated. Older versions of TYPO3 are not on our radar because 
support for 4.4 will end in October, once 4.6 --rebase is released.

Ben will get in touch with Dominique to host the new translation server 
Dominique set up on our typo3.org infrastructure. Xavier and possibly 
François will have a meeting with Dominique before our next swiss 
French-speaking TUG event in Lausanne to help him integrating his work 
into Core.

Roles in Backend
----------------------------

Xavier suggested to forget about this idea for the time being.

Dashboard
----------------------------

Having a full-fledge dashboard is perhaps ambitious given the time-frame 
we have but we still aim at getting rid of prototype and script.aculo.us 
and this should continue with a refactoring of the backend toolbar on 
top using ExtJS instead.

TCEforms refactoring
----------------------------

Currently, the whole feature set is not supported and this is what 
prevents integration of partial work into Core as we do not want 
partially-working alternatives to existing ones which in the end stays 
forever and forces us to maintain two code bases. However, we should not 
forget that 4.6 is a development branch which lets us do major work 
without worrying too much.

Install Tool
----------------------------

Benni did some further refactoring using Fluid and, we quote him, "It 
just turned out to be working :-)". He is refactoring "bottom to top", 
recoding every page and separating them. More than half of them are 
already refactored. Some tests such as changing the install tool 
password should be performed but basics will be ready for alpha2 
already. Adding a security section is most probably something that will 
happen for alpha3.

FAL
----------------------------

Olly will get in touch with the team to see how to integrate at least 
the API and a basic implementation of the current fileadmin operation 
which should be more than ready now into alpha2.

REST / Web Services
----------------------------

Xavier will get in touch with the team to enquire about the progress.

File Upload
----------------------------

Xavier will get in touch with the team to enquire about the progress.

BE performance
----------------------------

Steffen is planning to do some prototyping to enhance the loading mask 
after moving. We currently have about 56 JS files loaded and this is 
something to consider too to speed up the Backend, although many of them 
are related to prototype and script.aculo.us.

Packaging
----------------------------

Packaging of 4.6 alpha1 allowed us to find and fix some glitches in the 
scripts. The next releases such as the 4.5.3 planned for next week will 
take advantage of those bug fixes.

Dates
============================

- TYPO3 4.6 alpha2 on June 14th 2011
- Feature Freeze and TYPO3 4.6 beta1 on August 2nd 2011
    no new features and no exceptions after the feature freeze date
- Final Release of TYPO3 4.6.0 on October 25th 2011

Next steps
============================

If you feel interested in a particular project or task, please reply on 
the list or directly get in contact with Xavier Perseguers as Release 
Manager of TYPO3 4.6.


[1] http://forge.typo3.org/issues/25749
[2] http://wiki.typo3.org/Git_Gerrit
[3] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-form
[4] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-xliff

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Cheers,
Xavier

-- 
Xavier Perseguers
Release Manager TYPO3 4.6

TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!
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