[TYPO3-core] TYPO3 6.2 beta6 and final steps until release

[Ernesto Baschny]

Hi,

we are now in the last 4 weeks of development until the first release of
TYPO3 6.2 LTS (6.2.0).

The plan for this next phase is the following:


1) beta6 to be released next Tuesday, March 4th, 2014

The focus of this week is to finish work on the Workpackages projects.

The goal is also to have beta6 "usability-complete", meaning that we
need to finish all usability improvements until then. This doesn't mean
that we cannot fix UX/CSS bugs after that, but the overall look & feel
should not change substantially after beta6. This is important for
screenshots and screencasts to be made (documentation).

We also want to finish the work on language labels for beta6, so that
translators can really work on getting the translations ready until
release. Since not many labels changes since 6.1, this will most
probably not mean too much work.


2) Code Sprint Venlo vom March 10th until 12th [1]

Focus of Venlo will clearly be:
* Fixing / Final stabilization
* Documentation work
* Testing / QA, trying out the new features, fixing bugs etc


3) Potentially a last beta (beta7) on Thursday, March 13th, 2014

Right after the Code Sprint, if it makes sense by then. Else we just
skip this final beta and just work on until:


4) First release candidate (RC) on March 18th


5) Final Release March 25th => Party!!! [2]


And now some additional notes:

1) We should now focus our energy on important improvements which
doesn't bind our resources too much on not so important details.

One example are big micro-optimization patches that affect the whole
core (changing PHP methods or function calls). Those changes are good
and usually improve both the code readability and/or performance but
have a huge potential of introducing regressions as we have seen in the
past few weeks. Since we don't have a 100% unit test coverage in our
core, it's just "by acident" that we are later able to spot potential
flaws with it. So we should spare our energy with them right now, and
keep them in mind for the beginning of the next development cycle (for
the next release), so that we have a longer test-phase for them.

2) Performance improvements are always welcome, but let's now focus on
the "big eaters": What takes most effort during specific calls? We will
have two meet-ups to discuss a) Package Manager and b) Extbase
Performance. Also keep in mind that we can also add performance
improvements which doesn't change functionality or APIs after the 6.2.0
release (but keeping in mind that it's more risky to do so).

So let's rock'n roll!

Cheers,
Ernesto

[1] http://wiki.typo3.org/CMS_CodeSprint_2014/2:_Venlo
[2] http://wiki.typo3.org/Release_Party/TYPO3_6.2


-- 
Ernesto Baschny
TYPO3 CMS Core Developer
Release Manager TYPO3 4.5 & 6.2 LTS

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