Niclas Hedhman wrote:
Cocoon community is IMHO too focused of NOT releasing something BAD, instead
of focusing on releasing the new and good stuff.
If releases came out on a bi-weekly basis, who would be worried that a bug or
two sneaked in. Patch and it will be fixed in days. And with so many
community members having sites deployed off the HEAD, I doubt that much
regression would occur in reality, and committer sensibility is another
'safety net'.
My two cents.
Is this your perception of just Cocoon or all open source development.
What you are suggesting is unacceptable for use in a production
environment. When I release my product I don't want to have update the
framework every two weeks. And if there is a bug, the next release
probably won't be any better. Sure the bug might have been fixed, but
now will just have new ones because of all the new stuff. When you
deploy your production application on Tomcat or JBoss just how often are
you updating your container? We do it only when we have a new release
of our product coming out. We expect the frameworks we use to be
stable. And Cocoon is just another container just like Tomcat or JBoss.
I, for one don't deploy from head. I pick a stable release and use that
and then apply any patches I need to it after extensively testing.
By trying to minimize(!) the number of new features in each 2.x.0 release, the
users have less learning to cope with, when 'inhaling' a new feature release.
Going from 2.0 to 2.1 or 2.1 to 2.2 is overwhelming, especially if you have
not followed the dev-list.
This is a problem because the Cocoon "core" (i.e. - practically
everthing) is too big. "Real blocks" are the answer, not changes to
release management.
Further down the road, breaking codebase system apart, allowing individual
release cycles for core vs each block should also help in shortening the
cycle.
Here I absolutely agree. But until this is accomplished I am not in
favor of creating an unstable codebase.
"Ok to release?"
"yeah, yeah, yeah."
"I'll do it!"
./release.sh 2.5.1[enter]
done.
Cheers
Niclas
Ralph
