Reinhard Pötz wrote:
Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Reinhard Pötz wrote:
Versioning
-------------------------------
For Cocoon 2 there have been proposals that all odd versions are
development/alpha versions and all even versions are stable releases.
I like this idea and propose that we follow this versioning schema in
Cocoon 3: All 3.0.x releases are marked as development versions and we
clearly explain this on the website and the READMEs of all artifacts.
When we believe that the community and the technology are stable, we do
a 3.1.0 release.
I think this is less confusing than appending alpha, beta or milestone
postfixes.
I would say the contrary. Let's not forget that most of our users aren't
hard-core developers (they love Cocoon because they can do complex stuff
without programming) and they aren't used to this odd/even versioning
scheme that comes from the Linux kernel.
Rather than that, it seems to me that most of the "normal" (i.e. non
hard-core hacker) people consider a version without any "beta",
"milestone" or other suffix as an official stable release. A well-known
example is Firefox that goes through a series of milestones, beta and RC
version before releasing a stable version with the same number. Eclipse
does the same.
I don't have a strong opinion on this, except that I don't think that
the term milestone doesn't fit very well for us because this would imply
that we have like e.g. Eclipse a well-defined roadmap. And as we all
know, that's simply not the case.
Well, although there's no formal roadmaps, there are "big features" that
more or less define it, isn't it?
I'm also fine with 3.0-alpha-1, etc. and, see the reasons below, it's
probably better to change the proposal into this direction.
Also, I haven't voted for the renaming Corona to Cocoon 3.0 as I was on
vacation, but I really think this is too early. Cocoon 2.2 is just out
and we announce a 3.0. This will most probably lead people to consider
2.2 as a transition to 3.0 and just not use it, and thus just look
elsewhere. Stated clearly, I have fears that just as Maven almost killed
the developer community for 2.2, announcing a 3.0 now will kill the user
community.
We had three possible routes for Corona:
1) Develop Corona outside of the Cocoon project (e.g. Google,
Sourceforge, etc.)
2) Find some alternative name and release it under this codename.
3) Release it as Cocoon 3.0-alpha-x
1) would have been really dangerous IMO. What would people have thought
if the former PMC chair created an alternative project that is a
reimplementation of Cocoon outside of the oversight of the Cocoon PMC.
And that just a few months after his resignation.
I totally agree with this, and Apache has the necessary rules and
infrastructure to host experiments/rewrites/revolutions under the
project's umbrella.
2) Many people advised not to invent another codename. Also the name
finding game wasn't really successful. Personally I'm not willing to
invest any more time into this.
I don't think there's even a need to play the name game: if the
experiment/rewrite/revolution is successful, it just takes over the main
branch (e.g. Catalina that has replaced Tomcat) and otherwise it just
dies and vanishes.
3) Releasing 3.0 comes with the risk that 3.0 never takes off and
doesn't attract a broader developer and user community. But as long as
we only release alpha software, we can even do a re-rewrite.
Not sure I follow you here, and how 3.0 or any other name prevents a
rewrite as long as there hasn't been any stable release. Now if there is
an ongoing effort on something named "3.0" and suddenly this thing is
rewritten, this is likely to be interpreted by the community as "we
don't really know where we're going" which not a good thing.
Regarding your "too early announced" argument, I'm not so pessimistic.
Most people very well understand the difference between production
quality and alpha software and that alpha software is no guarantee for
anything (time, quality/stability, community). Addtionally we will add
warnings to all download pages, READMEs and also adding "alpha" helps.
Also other projects demonstrate that having an alpha branch doesn't make
most people wait for the final release of the alpha branch (see Tomcat,
Jetty, Maven, httpd, etc.). And if you have time to wait, I don't think
that you really have to solve a problem.
I hope you're right.
Additionally we have taken care that Cocoon 2.2 can be run in parallel
with Cocoon 3.0 in the same web application and they can event
communicate via the Servlet-Service framework with each other.
Great!
Sylvain
--
Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
