[TYPO3-core] TYPO3 4.7 Feature Freeze postponed

[Steffen Ritter]

Dear readers,

On last minute the TYPO3 Core Team decided to postpone the release of 
TYPO3 4.7 beta 1 which had been scheduled for yesterday. Traditionally 
beta versions always mark the feature freeze  major version currently 
being developed.
As we sometimes get to know with open source development and mostly free 
time working developers not all of our targets always can be fulfilled.
In the last few weeks we already had a hot topic you already might have 
heart about: the „lesson learned“ issue with the ExtJS 4 migration.

But in addition to that we are dealing with another hot topic - the file 
abstraction layer. There have been aims already about one year ago, to 
get a first rudimentary version of that enhancement into the release of 
TYPO3 4.5 LTS - however that initiative was postponed back then to 
re-evaluate and improve the whole concepts a lot. Focussing on TYPO3 
4.7, a lot of work as been put into this particular project, as well as 
in side-projects like a completely new media management component 
(formerly known as digital asset management - DAM). To cut a very long 
story short, development on the file abstraction layer feature got 
delayed - one of the major reasons for sure was the fact that ExtJS 4 
was dropped (as already mentioned above) and a series of other new 
components had to be cleaned up again. So, we are a bit too late to keep 
the feature freeze, but still want to deliver the final release with 
FAL. Since TYPO3 4.0, the file abstraction layer is considered to be the 
first again with an incredible impact for editors, integrators and 
developers. It is self-evident that we do not put work to the TYPO3 
Core, that we don‘t consider to be stable and finished.

Even by putting a lot of efforts in working on moving the current state 
of the File Abstraction Layer to the TYPO3 core GIT-repository the FAL 
Team informed us on last notice, that they consider the current state 
not to be stable enough for core merge and asked for a two week grace 
period with exception of Feature Freeze for the FAL.

As for me as Release Manager on the one hand I am not in favour of such 
exceptions. It was and is a common rule, features not being ready until 
the scheduled feature freeze, just get postponed to the next release - 
in this case it would have been 4.8 in about six months instead of 4.7. 
As we have promised to bring the File Abstraction Layer into 4.7 this 
decision in this case would not have been an easy one.

The pros and cons of the possibilities we had, have been discussed with 
the TYPO3 Core Development Team. Based on the support and opinion of 
them I decided to agree to the request of the FAL team.
Anyhow to ensure that the second FAL related delay in our Roadmap will 
finally fulfill its aims, there are some pre-assumptions taken care of:
Core-Team Members which have not been involved in the FAL project yet, 
jump in and promise to spend some additional hours on the FAL
all the issues / problems and tasks are cleaned up and moved and updated 
on forge, categorized and prioritized as well as split up to smaller 
tasks to easily keep track of them
all these pressing issues are assigned to people.

Currently the following issues are considered as blockers to have FAL 
integrated to the TYPO3 Core (find the updated list of blockers here: 
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-fileabstractionlayer/issues?query_id=299 
):

- Review and fix code in csc-uploads to stay backwards-compatible 
(registers),
   http://forge.typo3.org/issues/33929
   taken care of by Steffen Ritter

- Check existing functionality with TCA=>type=db,internal_type=file
   http://forge.typo3.org/issues/33253

- New TypoScript cObject for FAL files
   http://forge.typo3.org/issues/32800

- Remove old publishing infrastructure
   http://forge.typo3.org/issues/32791
   taken care of by Benjamin Mack

- Carefully check behaviour of upgrade wizards
   http://forge.typo3.org/issues/33951

-  Reviews, restructuring and merge preparations by Oliver Hader (get a 
collection of relevant issues at http://forge.typo3.org/issues/33745 )


In addition you can find more issues on Forge: 
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-fileabstractionlayer/issues.


As a result, the Beta 1 release of TYPO3 4.7 will be released on 
February 28th 2012 but the final release date will remain the same.
I hope you all can understand and support our decisions and if you have 
any questions about this decision feel free to contact me via email.


regards

Steffen Ritter

-- 
Steffen Ritter
Release Manager TYPO3 4.7

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