[TYPO3-core] Thoughts about current core

[Christian Kuhn]

Hey,

On 09/12/2012 07:38 AM, Georg Ringer wrote:
> I am back from 3 weeks holidays with no checking mails at all. Now I
> find myself in a kind of absolutly new core - here my thoughts about.
>
> 1st: WOW!
> 2nd: WTF ;)

Yeah, it is huge and has high impact.


> Yes of course I knew about the namespace stuff and I hope I get used to
> that, especially when it was in earlier days
> t3lib_div::isFirstPartOfStr()
> and now it is
> \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Utility\GeneralUtility::isFirstPartOfStr() which is way
> more to write and I haven't yet found how a good autocomplete can work
> there.

I think naming is *much* better now. I'm already getting used to it. I'm 
sure that we will communicate a lot in this area to show people the 
advantages and ease of use of this approach.


> My concerns:
> - People don't know yet that there are *so many* changes in the core

Yes. We still need much more communication on the whole thing. A lot 
pieces of information are already there, but it is not encapsulated very 
well at central points, or cluttered in different news.


> - IMO quite many extensions won't work anymore with 6.0 and people are
> just not used to that

The compat layer is still not there where it has to be. Currently, if 
the php < 5.3.7 problem is solved (https://review.typo3.org/#/c/14376/), 
I have no other systematically issue on my radar anymore.
So regarding the namespace switch and compatibility, the rest should be 
bug fixes only, like the one you did yesterday. In the end it should be 
possible to run most clean extensions like your news as is, and problems 
in this area should be considered as bugs (with the exception of 
xclasses: they do break).
I personally still had no time to test more of the usual extensions to 
test for current compat state and to sort out some gremlins.


> - 6.0 could be shipped with quite some bugs which happened during all
> those changes

There will always be bugs. Currently, I do not really fear the 
namespacing anymore (it works amazingly well), but more the state of the 
other big core internal changes like especially FAL, the em and the lang 
handling module ... So you're right, there are plenty of things to do, 
we're lacking manpower, need patches, tests and good reviews.


> - People who are used the old TYPO3 won't see the benefits of all the
> changes.

This is mostly about communication again.
There are thousands of positive arguments, I take the new em as example: 
I remember a day where it took me 8 hours of hard work for a one line 
patch to fix an obvious bug in old em (not joking). The new codebase is 
soooo much better and easier to use, that these days are finally over 
and I'm sure that we will see much more action in those areas. This 
leads to way more agility and faster improvement cycles.


> Btw currently I don't get XCLASS anymore
> running.

+1 on documentation and communication.
XCLASSING with namespaces works, take a look at dbal's ext_autoload and 
the according classes and their namespaces.


> Don't get me (or my twitter msgs) wrong, changes are awesome but those
> should be explained a bit more.

I'm glad you're back! We really missed you and your happy clean patches 
the last weeks.


This is for all developers and especially our experienced core team 
members: We need you *now*! Every single patch that fixes a glitch and 
is merged for 6.0 will make your life easier for 6.0, please help with 
reviews and tests :)


Regards
Christian