[TYPO3-core] Proposal for the upcoming Roadmap and LTS

[Ernesto Baschny [cron IT]]

Hi Lukas,

Lukas Rueegg [RTP] schrieb am 09.11.2012 13:23:
> Hi
> 
> Thanks Dmitry to share your thoughts about that. I completely agree with
> that.
> 
> I must say, I was (falsely) assuming that a part of our membership fee
> to the T3A would go to the core development and its maintainance
> already. If this is really not the case, I'm motivated to try to change
> that... It can't be that the T3A just cares about FLOW/NEOS without
> caring about the current stable versions.

The T3A cares about what TYPO3 enthusiasts around the globe present them
in form of Budget Applications, which now for the first time the Members
will be able to vote on (in the past the decision was rather "internal").

Here are the proposals for 2013 and also the discussion around them:

	http://forge.typo3.org/projects/t3a-eab-budget2013/boards

My application for the TYPO3 CMS (v6) Core Team is being discussed here:

	http://forge.typo3.org/boards/15/topics/51

It is also somehow explained here:

	http://buzz.typo3.org/people/ernesto-baschny/article/typo3-core-budget-application-2013/

The application itself (linked in the forum, the "form.odt" explains the
application:

<quote>
For 2013 we will put more emphasis to the following aspects, which
should pave the path to our next LTS release by the end of 2013:

a) 4 planned Code Sprints per Release (thus 8 per year)
b) Lowering work-time of Core Team Leader (Olly Hader, from 10 days to 6
days per month), rising Co-Leader work time (Benni Mack and Helmut
Hummel from 2 to 4 days per month)
c) enabling a new worktime for a „Coder / Quality Assurance“ (Christian
Kuhn, 4 days per month), which is the „guy“ responsible for all
necessary coding tasks that noone volunteerly is wanting to do (clean
ups, unit tests, post-reviews, pre-release coding / fixing, etc). This
work-load might also be shared with the Co-Leaders.
</quote>

Thus "c)" is exactly the kind of "guy" we are talking about in this
thread, which does Maintainance, bug fixing, QA. We also noted that
there will potentially be a need for a further LTS during the 2013
period, thus we applied for a bit larger budget than in 2012.

So considering the discussion in this list that the "T3A has to finance
*the guys* that do the boring maintainance task", in part this has been
thought about already. Currently there is no definite plan on how the
budget will get distributed.

Fact is that our Core Team is not a bunch of "developers we can hire at
any time". So money is not the only issue (and if we get the budget
granted it's not an issue at all). One important issue remains: *who*
will do this, by which rules and policy, etc.

I would *gladly* pay developers doing backporting jobs to our officially
maintained branches (especially of course the LTS), and I feel from the
discussion here that most would agree to that:

* Agencies that are members from the T3A, which already expect this to
happen,
* Core Developers who are not motivated to do this boring job on a
volunteer basis.

It's just that in the past this has *all* been volunteer work, and it's
not easy to distinguish that at all times: deciding who gets payed and
who does not could cause some bad feelings. Having a stricter set of
rules about exactly when "money is being payed for TYPO3 CMS
development" could probably make it more transparent for everybody.

Cheers,
Ernesto


> On 2012-11-09 07:41:17 +0000, Dmitry Dulepov said:
> 
>> Well, there was time when I did not object to earn some extra money
>> for such unpleasant and boring work as backporting fixes to older
>> releases and testing them. I would do that with proper quality and
>> dedication as I do any paid work. But it was always said that TYPO3
>> work is free work, so devs will not be paid unless it is a project,
>> which is important to T3A.
>>
>> I think TYPO3 development (excluding Neos and its projects) mostly
>> lives on two types of developers:
>> - enthusiasts, which wear off in 0.5-3 years and disappear
>> - devs paid by agencies to do changes that agencies need
>>
>> I always thought that this model is very risky to have because it is
>> not possible to rely on any devs from these groups. Any of them could
>> have "more important stuff to do" and that happened many times in the
>> past when declared projects were delayed by 1-2 releases or canceled.
>> Other projects are certainly introduced because enthusiasts are simply
>> interested in them. So there is no definite list of what comes into
>> the next release. It is all by guess and chance.
>>
>> On the other hand, paid work (as Neos, etc) tends to go for years
>> without producing usable results, which causes doubts that paid work
>> is really effective.
>>
>> I'd say the best working model for TYPO3 would be like this:
>> - paid core team leader + release managers for mantained releases
>> - 2-3 paid devs, who work full time for TYPO3
>> - any enthusiasts, who want to work as a core team
>> - strict scheduler for paid people when and what to deliver (proper
>> project management for them)
>>
>> Of course, there are issues with this model too:
>> - why X gets paid and Y does not?
>> - why other teams are not paid even though they are very important too
>> (infrastructure, documentation, etc)?
>>
>> I think this is a set of questions that T3A should think of and
>> decide. Their major task should be to ensure that we get stable
>> development, which also moves forward using the defined roadmap.
>> Otherwise we will always have these discussions that do not yield any
>> useful results.
> 
>