[TYPO3-core] SVN closed for now, do not commit!

[Francois Suter]

Hi,

> I also propose to release 4.3 this year ;-) so 
> it wouldn't be that far off.

I hope this is a debate that the core team will have on its next 
meeting. I think the current release philosophy and cycle are too 
constraining. IMHO there are 2 factors that plead in favor of more 
frequent (major) releases:

- ever since the core-team ML was opened to all, activity has picked up 
tremendously. A lot of new ideas have been pouring in and it seems 
contradictory to hold them all off for over a year.

- the emergence of v5 puts pressure onto the evolution of 4.x. Although 
v5 is nowhere near usable for production yet and will certainly not be 
for quite some time (no criticism here, that's just my gut feeling), it 
is still on the horizon and major work (like the new installer) should 
not be put off for a year or more, lest their impact on TYPO3 be pretty 
small after all (i.e. a lot of work for little use).

There are several options I can imagine and I'm sure others can come up 
with more. They are not mutually exclusive and could be combined:

- accelerated release cycles: this is the obvious one. 6 months is sure 
a bit tight, but maybe we could aim for 9 months, which would mean 3 
releases over the course of 2 years. It would place 4.3 at Xmas this 
year, which seems fair enough.

- major release on demand: a major release could be decided when a major 
project (like the new installer; I'm not being obsessive :-) reaches 
completion. When the project is near completion a release process would 
be started. Whatever feature is ready by then gets in too.

- differentiated feature levels: one drawback of the current policy (if 
I'm not mistaken) is that there are only minor release in between major 
ones, and minor release are striclty bugfix releases. This means new 
features can only get into major release. But there's a big difference 
between a major undertaking like the cleaner backend and the 
introduction of a new hook or transforming some TS property from a 
string to a stdWrap, for example. Either such features should be allowed 
into minor releases or maybe we should have an intermediary level of 
releases (NMBNME = Not Major But Not Minor Either ;-). One could imagine 
having 4.2, then bugfix 4.2.1 and 4.2.2, then 4.2.10 which would mark it 
as a minor release but with some new stuff in it.

Food for thought...

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch