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

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 12-11-2012 12:20, Ernesto Baschny [cron IT] wrote:
> To make this clear, Christian Kuhn haven't been hired for backporting
> fixes to the LTS.

Yes, there was only a budget application and the work would include a 
lot more and perhaps no backporting at all.

> *But* this budget could also be used for someone to step in and do the
> backporting part of the work.

I doubt that there will be time for it within the budget. The couple of 
days a month that is available is already needed for all the other 
activities.

> Question remains on who is willing to do more maintenance work. If
> someone steps in and applies for such a job: we can talk about it. We
> could support guys like you (Mario) doing the "actual work" of
> backporting and testing financially (to minimize the frustration
> level...) but undoubtedly we need one or two Core Developers to do the
> actual final reviews and merging.

At the moment the core dev who dares to hit the submit button has the 
honour to do the backporting. This takes considerable time, especially 
if some testing is involved.
If the work of backporting and testing is done by others there is some 
time left to do the final reviews and merging.

I've already seen quite often that core devs give the second vote, but 
do not merge the change. I don't know the motivation, but it could very 
well be that they don't have the time at that moment to do the backporting.

>> If there is another LTS version, perhaps with considerable overlap these
>> few days a month might not be enough. More (hired) manpower could be a
>> solution here.
>
> Regardless of whether the new LTS turns out to be 6.1 (Apr/2013) or 6.2
> (Oct/2013), the required amount of time required to be spend maintaining
> them is the same, as in both situations we will have exactly the same
> amount of releases to maintain at the same time:
>
> * 4x from Apr-Oct/2013: 6.1, 6.0, 4.7, 4.5 LTS
> * 3x from Oct/2013 on (*): 6.2, 6.1, 4.5 LTS

The hardest are the backports from 6.x to 4.x. And it does take quite a 
bit of time to do the other branches as well. As said, I doubt that a 
couple of days per month is enough to do all the work as in 
post-previews, unit testing, etc. plus the backports.

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 Core Team member

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