[TYPO3-core] Package Management in 6.2

[Ernesto Baschny]

Hi,

there was some discussions lately about the maturity and some
performance concerns of the newly introduced Package Management [1]. We
have included this feature in beta1 back in October/2013 and several
people have been improving it since.

It was clear from the beginning that the Package Management included in
6.2 is only the first step of a road to be tackled also after 6.2
release. So the feature set of this Package Management in 6.2 is not yet
fully blown with what we expect it to have in future releases. It is
meant as a stable base upon which we can build our next releases. The
Extension Manager, the TER and other related components will need to get
more improvements to make better use of the framework we now have.

Nevertheless the new feature already has gained lots of fans, which use
it's benefits:

- better support their Composer based deployment infrastructure
- loading TYPO3 Flow based packages inside TYPO3 CMS
- using PSR-0 compliant namespaces throughout extensions
- others... if you have a story to tell with this feature, please share!

The feature includes a more strict extension dependency handling and
enforces correct ordering of extension loading. This will enforce
extensions of the future to provide more accurate dependency information
in their meta data - which is good. Of course this might cause some pain
at start, when extensions haven't been adapted yet, but this "cleanup"
it's worth the hassle.

There have been some performance aspects which came up with the
introduction of this feature together with the new Class Loading framework.

This week, the CMS team met to make a final decision to keep the Package
Management included as a new feature of 6.2 and focus all energy and
enthusiasm to get it really stable and fast.

We have a Workpackage [2] dedicated to continue solving performance
issues in 6.2 where sponsors are even paying money to get the next LTS
release not only stable but also as speedy as possible.

There are some ideas on where we could still improve the performance
[3]. There are also some work in progress in the area of Caches and the
Class Loader.

We also decided that the performance improvements might continue even
after the 6.2.0 release (March, 25th), of course taking care that these
post-release improvements are non-breaking.

Contact me or the team if you want to help out in that area, or simply
use this mailing list platform to discuss it with us.

Cheers,
Ernesto


[1] http://wiki.typo3.org/Blueprints/Packagemanager
[2] http://www.workpackages.org/
[3] http://forge.typo3.org/issues/56307

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

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