Hi All, I am all for a roadmap. This will help us in communications with existing and potential customers. It will also help us with planning of internal activities related to the OFBiz product.
+1 Pierre Smits 2012/2/21 Jacopo Cappellato <jacopo.cappell...@hotwaxmedia.com> > Hi all, > > I would like to share some ideas I have to make our release plan more > clearer, public and well defined. > > This plan doesn't require additional work from the community (apart from > the due diligence when we will call for votes) because I will take care > about preparing release candidate files, sign them and call for votes; then > publish them if the vote is successful. > This is basically what we did in the last 2 years with the only (big) > difference that the release schedule will be decided and announced in > advance on fixed dates. > For example, we could decide that during the year 2012 (the same scheme > could be used for 2013 etc...) we will issue a release from each branch > every 4 months like this: > > * release 11.04 around 2012-04-15 > * release 11.04.01 around 2012-08-15 > * release 11.04.02 around 2012-12-15 > > * release 10.04.01 around 2012-03-15 > * release 10.04.02 around 2012-07-15 > * release 10.04.03 around 2012-11-15 > > * release 09.04.02 around 2012-02-15 > * release 09.04.03 around 2012-06-15 > * release 09.04.04 around 2012-10-15 > > Or we could decide on a less aggressive schedule and release each branch > every 6 months etc... > > And we could also vote in advance for the time a release branch will be > closed: for example we could vote that the community will not release and > apply patches to the release branch 09.04 after the release 09.04.04 (this > is just an example as I would like to propose to close the 09.04 branch > earlier than this). New patches/contributions (always welcome) for that > branch (after it is closed) will not be applied to the branch and will stay > in Jira for interested parties (unless the community will decide to reopen > it). > > In this way users will know in advance when a branch will be deprecated, > how many bug fix releases will be issued and based on this information > could prepare in time for the upgrades (or switch between major releases). > > Of course there will be exceptions: maybe we will have to release out of > schedule to fix some major security issues or we could skip a release if no > changes since the previous one were committed etc... > > When the plan is in place we could then prepare a nice roadmap diagram to > be published in our Download page. The roadmap will not be feature based > and for this reason it should be doable with the current structure and > resources we have in the community: I know it would be also nice to plan > and work together on a features set, but this will definitely require more > coordination, agreement and effort... we can (and should) always try to do > that also but this is another topic (for another thread). > In the meantime, with this time based release plan we will have something > real to play with. > > Please let me know what you think. > > Thanks, > > Jacopo >
