[xwiki-devs] [VOTE] New Strategy for the XWiki Github Organization

Hi devs, I’m transforming the brainstorming that was started in the thread http://markmail.org/message/exlndbq3tw2thmmu into a VOTE mail since this is a very important decision. So I’m asking you to vote for defining a new direction for the XWiki Core Dev Team (i.e. for the XWiki GitHub Organization). The need was triggered by the Tour and CKEditor extensions which are currently in xwiki-contrib and that we want our users to have by default. For more details see this thread: http://markmail.org/message/exlndbq3tw2thmmu So here’s the strategy: * Make XWiki Github org == minimal runtime, where minimal means “basic wiki” (page edition, history, linking, wiki markup, etc). The notion of “basic wiki” would need to be better defined but this can be done later on. * Provide a "Base Flavor" which corresponds to this “basic wiki”, as part of xwiki-platform (this would be xwiki-platform-distribution). * Provide another flavor, the "Default Flavor” which would add some hand-picked third-party extensions (i.e. from contrib) such as the Tour app and CKEditor (to start with, we could also add the markdown syntax for example which is one of the most asked syntaxes). Note that this Default Flavor would actually be a “replacement" of xwiki-enterprise. * The Default Flavor would have at least the same release cycle as the base flavor but it could have more releases (if some of the bundled third-party extensions has some important bug fixes or new features that we want to offer quickly without waiting for the next base flavor release). * The consequence is that the XWiki Dev Team would need to be a bit more careful to monitor the quality of bundled third-party extensions in contrib (check commits, do some smoke testing, etc). Note that the goal of the Default flavor would not be to offer verticals (for this there should be some contrib flavors) and thus it wouldn’t bundle a lot of third-party extensions. Basically we’ll need to validate the version of those third-party extensions that include in the flavor. My POV is that globally this would offer more flexibility for our users (they’ll be able to install extensions such as CK and Tour in older XWiki versions and they’ll get more frequent releases) at the cost of some overhead to develop extensions that work in several versions. The dev team is pretty small and thus it means developing a bit less fast but it’s probably as important, if not more important, to make the code we develop available in older xwiki versions, as XWiki gains traction. Here’s my +1 Please cast your vote. Thanks -Vincent