7 May
2014
7 May
'14
8:43 a.m.
Hi Marius,
Thanks for your reply with challenging questions ;) See below.
On 7 May 2014 at 07:31:34, Marius Dumitru Florea
(mariusdumitru.florea@xwiki.com(mailto:mariusdumitru.florea@xwiki.com)) wrote:
You mentioned 2 needs and your proposal satisfies only
the second.
What about the first need?
Who's going to be responsible for releasing these extensions?
The xwiki-extensions organization is under the responsibility of the XWiki Dev Team so
it’s the XWiki Dev Team who will release its extensions.
We don't
have many options when it comes to choosing a release manager for XE
so I doubt committers will jump in to release these extensions unless
they really need them. So we may end up with either
* having long release cycles for these extensions (which is against
the second need you mentioned) because everyone has other things to do
(note that this currently happens with some of the maintained
extensions from xwiki-contrib), or
* using the XE release manager and releasing all of them at once, but
then having a separate GitHub repo for each extension is not
justified.
In any case, the time spend on doing releases and the paper work
around them will increase and it will most probably be the time of the
XE release manager.
Yes I agree about your points. We need to handle this.
Now
===
The new xwiki-extensions organization strategy will work only if we get more committers.
The idea is to get the contributors of those extensions as committers for those extensions
and thus be the RM for those extensions.
Said differently we need a defined RM per repo.
Note that longer release cycles is not an issue if the extensions has not had any code
committed for it. What’s important is to be able to get it in the hands of users when
there are important bug fixes or new features. It seems logical to me that those who
commit these bugs/features release them.
It’s obvious that separated extensions would mean a lot more work *if* we wanted to always
release them all. But this is not the case. They’ll be released when those working on them
want to release them or under user pressure.
What we need to decide is how we want to handle Roadmaps and Release notes. I think we
should start defining roadmaps per extension on e.x.o (we already support RN on e.x.o
using either the jira macro or manually).
Generally speaking for each extension that we add to xwiki-extensions we need a person
resonsible for it, who’ll be in charge of defining the roadmaps, release notes and do the
releases (he/she can delegate but he/she will still be responsible until that
responsibility is handed to someone else. I believe this will be one criteria for
accepting an extension in xwiki-extensions.
Future
======
When we have the notion of Flavors, I believe it will simplify things to organize releases
per flavor (XE can be considered a flavor ATM BTW). When this time comes we could decide
to have a RM per flavor with a Roadmap/Release notes per flavor. I have no idea how many
flavors we would have but I can think of 3:
- xwiki.org flavor (FAQ app, JIRA macro, IRCBot app, etc)
- knowledge base flavor (…)
- collaborative apps flavor (calendar, meeting manager, file manager, etc)
As for moving extensions out of xwiki-contrib to
xwiki-extensions,
it's not simple. First, it's not very clear which contrib extensions
will be chosen. You said "some maintained apps" but the link you gave
is more about the functionality they provide and whether they fit in
our view of the collaborative app suite. Then in order to move an
extension you need to ask the contributors, otherwise you'll have to
fork the repo and create a new extension id.
They’ll be chosen on a case by case basis with a VOTE for each. The person proposing it
will put forward a maintainer for the extensions (who will be responsible of
Roadmap/Releases Notes and performing releases).
Note that IMO there are some conditions that we could define as base conditions:
* Having had several releases already
* Obeying the app best practices as defined
by http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/ApplicationDevelopmentBestPra…
* Having some tests and for apps, having at least one functional test (this means the
functional test fwk is in place and ready to receive more tests)
* Code style needs to obey http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/CodeStyle and
generally speaking obey the practices defined on http://dev.xwiki.org
Then what happens if an
extension from xwiki-extensions stops being maintained, do we move it
back to xwiki-contrib?
Yes, same as what happens currently in the xwiki organization.
I'm not fully convinced by your proposal.
The real goal of this proposal is to start having nice applications that can be a showcase
of XWiki. Till now we have the engine and some extensions but none of them are developed
as strongly as platform and they fall short. This is an effort to make a usable XWiki
*product* vs just an XWiki *platform*.
Again, we should take in only extensions that we can maintain, i.e. for which we have a
volunteer to maintain them.
TBH I don’t know if this will succeed or not but I feel it’s worth trying :)
Do you have some better idea?
Thanks
-Vincent
Thanks,
Marius
On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 5:43 PM, vincent(a)massol.net wrote:
> Hi devs,
>
> Right now we have 2 organizations related to the XWiki project on Github: xwiki and
xwiki-contribs.
>
> The separation is currently the following:
> * XWiki Committers maintain the code in the “xwiki” organization
> * non XWiki Committers (aka contributors) maintain the code in the “xwiki-contrib”
organization in the way they want (some extensions there are not maintained, others are
maintained)
>
> After brainstorming with Thomas Mortagne we’d like to propose the following
changes:
>
> Need
> =====
>
> * Be able to extract some maintained apps from xwiki-contrib to separate them from
less maintained extensions. For example the top apps listed here:
http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/CollaborativeApplications
> * Be able to extract some extensions currently located in xwiki-platform but not
released with XE so that they can have a different release cycle (examples: FAQ app,
IRCBot extension, JIRA macro, etc). Having different release cycle allow to release new
versions quicker to our users (bug fixes, new features).
>
> Proposal
> =======
>
> * Introduce a new xwiki-extensions organization in GitHub which would be maintained
by the XWiki Dev Team (aka XWiki Committers)
>
> * For now, move out of xwiki/xwiki-platform all modules that are not bundled by
default in XE. This rule will be reviewed and modified when we introduce the flavors
concept in the future. The idea is that xwiki-platform will contain “core extensions” only
and as we progress towards extensions, the number of core extensions will get smaller and
smaller till possibly only the EM and what it requires. Everything else would be located
in the xwiki-extensions organization
>
> * Have one repository per extensions in the xwiki-extensions github organization so
that each extension can be released independently of each other
>
> * In order to make it simple to release, the idea would be to have Roadmaps and
aggregated Release Notes per Flavor (this is what we’re doing now with the “XE” flavor
BTW).
>
> * We will be able to vote in committers for specific repos located in the
xwiki-extensions organization without having them voted for the xwiki organization
(although, over time, they would be able to become xwiki committers for the xwiki
orgnization should they wish and if they’re voted in)
>
> * Extensions from xwiki-extensions published on e.x.o would have “XWiki Development
Team” as author, which means they will be officially supported by the xwiki committers.
>
>
> WDYT?
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent & Thomas