[TYPO3-core] Minutes of the 14th TYPO3 4.7 Release Team Meeting

[Oliver Hader]

Hi everybody,

here are the minutes of the last TYPO3 4.7 Release Team Meeting. The
notes can be found on the Forge wiki pages as well:
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v47-projects/wiki/14th_Release_Team_Meeting_TYPO3_47

Cheers,
Olly

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*14th Release Team Meeting TYPO3 4.7*

The 4.7 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 core mailing list.

On Monday, March 19th 2012 we held our 14th meeting with the following
participants:

* Xavier Perseguers (4.6 Release Manager)
* Benni Mack (Core Team Co-Leader)
* Oliver Hader (Core Team Leader)

=============
= TYPO3 4.7 =
=============

Check migration/upgrade wizards
-------------------------------

Several components need a "guided way" in terms of new upgrade wizards
to migrate older TYPO3 version to TYPO3 4.7

*HTML5 per default*

* HTML5 can be used by modifying the TypoScript for frontend rendering
* however, making it the TYPO3-default frontend-rendering is
  temporarily abandoned for 4.7 to be the default case since Patrick
  Broens (as developer of that feature during the BLE phase) had valid
  concerns:
* the HTML5 RFC is still pending and thus not really a standard per
  definition, albeit a lot of enterprise websites are already built on
  it...

*UTF-8 per default*

* Non-UTF-8 was deprecated in TYPO3 4.5, however without guided
  migration path
* initDB, forceRenderCharset, metaCharset (FE)
* lookup whether all tables are in UTF-8 mode
* maybe binary check

Jigal has a converter script which is doing analysis and actually
converts data (however this one shall not be shipped with the Core -
instead we can imagine to put it to the TER).
In general we should make use of the exception codes that are redirected
to the wiki - more details on upgrading and the procedure will be
provided at those pages then.


===================
= TYPO3 4.6 & 4.5 =
===================

Fixing the regression-regression-fixes...
-----------------------------------------

* fixed http://forge.typo3.org/issues/34662 (Fatal Error Deprecation
  Log)
* modified http://forge.typo3.org/issues/30892 &
  http://forge.typo3.org/issues/34698 -> pending
  http://forge.typo3.org/issues/34820 (Preview Domain)
* example of the current implementation
** Backend URL https://backend.mydomain.com:8081/typo3/
** Result: http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?id=123
** Expected result: https://backend...:8081/index.php?id=123 - for some
   cases but not all
*** Problem: sometimes only /typo3/ may be used in "Frontend" =>
    "/index.php" does not work!
** General behavior: sys_domain takes precedence over Backend URL
* needs feedback http://forge.typo3.org/issues/34835 (Fatal Error with
  Preview Domain - could be reproduced)

The reproducible bugs are fixed in the accordant branches, thus we will
provide a buzz article explaining the behavior and how the patch can be
applied locally, out of the Gerrit review.
Thus, there won't be a dedicated release this week just to fix the
regressions - for sure, the fixes will be part of the next regular
maintenance releases.

====================
= TYPO3 in General =
====================

General LTS Strategy
--------------------

The main reason for TYPO3 4.5 being a LTS was to still be compatible
with PHP 5.2 and IE6 in the backend. Meanwhile support for PHP 5.2 has
been discontinued by PHP and also by most distributors.
Besides that our 6-monthly release cycle forced agencies to upgrade to
the next version very often and also was an argument to have an LTS
release. However, the period of 3 years seems to too long in general -
however, TYPO3 4.5 LTS will be supported until 2014 (sure!), but the
next LTS version might only be supported for e.g. 18-24 months.
The whole topic shall be discussed by the community - during T3DD12
there shall be a decision.

Backport Branches
-----------------

The interest of individually backporting features was rather low. The
goal in general is to promote latest stable releases, not the last LTS
version (since performance improvements and clean-up will only be part
of the latest version). Besides that most of the requested backports
depend on the overworked caching framework or are at least are related
to it - which makes it quite difficult to deal with the expected
backwards compatibility in an LTS version.
The whole topic needs to be explained and re-evaluate in detail -
feedback from the community is required here concerning "expectations"
of Backport Releases.

Future Development (master)
---------------------------

*File Abstraction Layer*

There was a mini-code sprint with Benni Mack, Ingmar Schlecht, Andreas
Wolf in Stuttgart during March 16th-18th 2012.
* getImgResource() was separated into smaller functional parts, see

http://git.typo3.org/TYPO3v4/Incubator.git?a=blob;f=t3lib/file/Service/FileProcessingService.php;hb=plain-fileabstraction
* Stanislas is currently working on RTE integration for FAL
* it's planned to recreate patches for review.typo3.org again next week
  - everybody is encouraged to review and test as much as possible then


----------------------------------------------------------------------
-- 
Oliver Hader
TYPO3 v4 Core Team Leader

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