No further updates to 3.2 branch?

Author Message

Paul Forsyth

Wednesday 22 October 2003 2:34:58 am

Am i right in thinking that there will no further updates to the 3.2 branch: http://pubsvn.ez.no/nextgen/stable/3.2/ ?

Since 3.2-2 was released I can see further bug fixes going into only the trunk. As a developer some of those bug fixes are of use to me but since 3.3 is undergoing rapid development i cant use it until at least beta 1 which is a month away.

Has a decision been made not to put bug fixes into 3.2 any more? We need an announcement forum for important decisions like this.

Paul

Bård Farstad

Wednesday 22 October 2003 2:45:35 am

Paul,

we've decided to only have one follow up release of 3.2, this means that the next stable release will be 3.3 final. We will have two beta releases of this as well.

Mabye we should have two follow up releases of every stable? One and two months after the final release, so we could include bugfixes and new translations.

Any input on this?

--bård

Documentation: http://ez.no/doc

Tony Wood

Wednesday 22 October 2003 7:48:18 am

Is this really true? no more updates? does this include bug fixes? there are several real problems that must be fixed in 3.2 if various features are to be used for a production site. All of our issues have been posted to thye bug reporting system, these need to be fixed and released in 3.2 and then rolled into 3.3.

Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development

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Paul Borgermans

Wednesday 22 October 2003 10:41:06 am

I also think a third point release for 3.2 would be good. Or alternatively a patch against 3.2-2 as a contribution to avoid the extra time in package building

-paul

eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training
http://twitter.com/paulborgermans

Paul Forsyth

Wednesday 22 October 2003 3:08:56 pm

Another point release may or may not be necessary. I think there should be one if there is a compelling reason to inform 3.2 users that they should update to the latest 3.2-X version.

Independant of this i think there are a number of reasons to continue adding bug fixes to the 3.2 branch.

1. Security Fixes. Surely these should be back ported to the appropriate branches.

2. Bug fixes to reported branches. Again, fixes for reports on branches should apply to those branches as well as trunk.

3. Trivial fixes. Bug fixes that do not play any part of current 3.3 development should be applied to 3.2. This adds little cost to the development process.

4. As ez 3.X matures/evolves i believe users will tend to stick to their current version of ez and only upgrade if there is a feature they must have. Bug fixing may be an essential element these users rely on. This of course places a cost on ez for maintainence so we perhaps need an explicit lifespan for maintainence on branches.

pubsvn.ez.no should be updated to reflect this. As Paul B is moderating this site there should be better communication with him. According to the press release ez are in control but this isn't the case.

Paul

Bård Farstad

Thursday 23 October 2003 1:13:21 am

I can agree with that people could use a 3.2-3 release of eZ publish, however we've not allocated resources for it during this development cycle. So I don't think we can do this now.

Currently we've (I've) underestimated the traffic in bug-reporting and feedback from the community, which has grown lately. Therefore we should allocate more resources to just maintain the current release, handle bugreports and do maintainance releases.

We will most likely change this for the 3.3 development cycle ( starts january next year ).

--bård

Documentation: http://ez.no/doc

Tony Wood

Thursday 23 October 2003 3:32:00 am

There are a couple of nasty ones that need fixing in 3.2

Some of the biggest ones for us are the workflow bug that means that if a user is in the "Users without approval" list they get an error when publishing. The other is the siteaccess problem for multilingual sites where you cannot lock down using uri;host for login. This has been resolved by a community member but not implemented in the main code.

There are other issues such as WebDAV problem that need to be looked at. The bug list is long, which is a good sign as it mean that people are using testing and taking the time to feedback to eZ. This is healthy.

These really need to be resolved in the current version as 3.3 is a long way off.

Yours hopefully

Tony

Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development

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Bård Farstad

Thursday 23 October 2003 4:14:46 am

Tony,

I agree with you, but the way we've allocated resources for this development cycle I don't see how we can get it done. We just don't have time for it (now).

I think the best thing we can do at this time is to learn from this and change the way we do this for the next development cycle (starting in january).

And yes, it's really great that we get so much feedback, bugreports and even bugfixes. Again, what's not so great is that we've not scheduled enough time during 3.3 development (before beta releases) to handle bugreports.

I hope you can understand that we do have to stick to our current plas for this period to get planned things done.

Just so there is no confusion: yes, we will fix all reproduceable bugs that are reported (unless they're because of design descisions). We just need some time.

--bård

Documentation: http://ez.no/doc

Tony Wood

Friday 24 October 2003 9:37:05 am

Thanks for the explanation, does this apply to Online Editor bugs too?
http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/bug_reports/online_editor_ie6_does_not_work_with_utf8

Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development

Power to the Editor!

Free eZ Training : http://www.VisionWT.com/training
eZ Future Podcast : http://www.VisionWT.com/eZ-Future

James Ward

Friday 24 October 2003 10:59:59 am

Just my $0.02.
eZ needs to seriously reconsider its development cycle. Going ahead with new feature requests before the current version is fully functional and bug free (or at least bug few) is irresponsible. I like what I'm hearing for changes to the development cycle.

You guys have a great product here but it scares admins like myself away when you go ahead with new features before the old features work properly.

More bug fixes and stability updates would go a long way to easing my concerns and making ezpublish a far more viable enterprise solution.

working at www.wardnet.com
blogging at www.jamesward.ca

Marco Zinn

Friday 24 October 2003 12:27:34 pm

I agree ;)
Seriously, I was (and still am) planning to go live with a 3.2 site in 3 weeks. Good news for us, is that our site is pretty plain-vanilla (single-language, no workflows yet).
Bad news is, that we couldn't use 3.2 final, installed 3.2-1 now and will install 3.2-2 next week and after reading this thread (and the bug DB), I don't feel well with that.
Suggestion:
Do more Pre-Releases (Beta's and Release-Candidates) and call a release "final", when the crucial bugs are removed. I don't care for neat little functions and features, which are in a changelog and which still do not work in the "final".
For me "Final" means: "Tested by at least the community and declared 98% bug-free and 99,5% usable".
"Follow-Up-Releases" should only be done, when necessary because of bug and could be (cumulative) patches against the final release. Functionality and Usability should be in the Final.
If this means, that you cannot keep your milestone for the final and must release the "final" 4 weeks later, do that. Do another "Release Candidate", but don't call it "Final", until it is "final".
Well, Bard knows my opinion about that.
You can impress customers with "meeting the deadline". But you will loose a lot of faith in ezPublish, when the "Final" is there, but hasn't the quality needed.
Do a Final Release "when it's done"... This works for Games, too ;))
(My 0,02 Euro)

Marco
http://www.hyperroad-design.com

Paul Forsyth

Sunday 26 October 2003 6:22:21 am

For bug fixes look at this thread:

http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/forum/developer/unofficial_bug_fixes_to_322_available

Paul

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