I have an uncomfortable gut feeling with the current status of our pre-release version and I'd like your feedback on these concerns and my suggestions to change our process.
My concerns with the current situation: - in the last few month a number of exciting major projects (location maps, views, i18n, change of cocoon ...)and a number of smaller ones have been developed (which is good!) - most of them have not been finished to the point of being releasable and (so it seems to me) will not be for considerable time so it seems like we won't be able to release quickly without a major clean-up effort (which I consider bad). - the work-in-progress-state and its (perfectly normal) unfinished documentation make it very hard for people to understand the development version or work with it at any point in time or understand the implications and side effects of each new development. What I'd like to see in the future: 1 Adjust our development process so that the current development version (I think this is called 'trunk') is always releasable, stable and _well documented_ (meaning complete and correct, not well written or suitable for a dummy user). 2 Develop all major changes and new features in separate branches that will only be merged back into trunk when they are stable and well documented (not talking refined documentation but good enough that a technical writer could work with it) and a good number of committers not involved in the process have reviewed and tested them. 3 Discuss and vote one merging each branch back into trunk. 4 Create a new release whenever such a merger has taken place so that new functionalities become quickly available to new users and can be stress tested in a production environment without too many changes to consider as a source for potential problems. This would also make testing of new releases a lot more focussed. Obviously plugins would not require a separate branch as they already have the whiteboard and a similar process. However, I would like to suggest an optional step 4 for important plugins (like views). 5 As a supportive measure, clearly mark threads in this list when they deal with a particular branch so that people not working on that issue can safely ignore it. Only take issues to the list as a general topic when interface issues or planned architectural changes require input from the general community or the development team is ready to show and explain their work and suggest a merger. wdyt? -- Ferdinand Soethe
