[xwiki-devs] Strategy for XWiki GitHub Organization (was Re: [Contrib] Tour Application dependency in XWiki)

On 08 Jun 2016, at 17:57, Denis Gervalle &lt;dgl(a)softec.lu&gt; wrote: Well, very sorry to drop in so late in this discussion, but it was not obvious from the thread subject that your were discussing a major subject. IMO, moving application that works currently on 6.x to the core, has no benefit for our users, it just introduce restrictions. It does not have any benefit for us either, it just require more backports. I do not understand this move at all for application that are not minimal requirements. I do not understand your point Vincent when you say that these applications are horizontal and obviously part of platform according to your "Executive summary". Regarding the tour application, it is not require at all, it is just a nice helping tool that we want to ease newcomers, but experienced user will never need it. It could be exchanged for an alternative, and it is exactly the same kind of application than the blog that we are moving out. Regarding the CKEditor, do we consider that a WYSIWYG editor is required for a wiki to be a wiki ? IMO, WYSIWYG editor is not a requirement to use the platform, it is nice to have, but not required. I have use it very sparsely until now, and not having it would not have change much for me. So, I currently do not see any benefit of moving these modules to platform, since these are already well living in contrib. Your other point about reducing platform to the minimal runtime would cause platform to reduce to EM does not really looks like something that will happen. In theory, you are right, so XWiki would be even less featured then maven. But, I doubt you could reasonably use such a tools for anything useful. I doubt XWiki compare to maven. I doubt that horizontal module like security, logging, model, storage, etc… will ever be considered optional. Even a plain text editor is a minimal requirement to starts, else this is no more a wiki, and I even wonder what it is ? a tool that brings together arbitrary java module… looks weird. So no, the minimal runtime is definitely not just EM. So, I really wonder what is the direction we are taking. I will not stop you with a veto, but I have the strong feeling these decisions are wrong. For the principle of not depending on contrib for our default user flavor, exchanging the blog app with the tour app, this does not make sens for me, sorry. Thanks for reading. On Wed, Jun 8, 2016 at 3:45 PM, Vincent Massol &lt;vincent(a)massol.net&gt; wrote: > FTR I’ve discussed internally with Thomas, Marius and Anca and we all > agreed that it makes sense to move The Tour app + CKEditor to the platform. > > There are various reasons but a very important one is simply the manpower > that it requires to maintain extensions on lots of XWiki versions and > currently the active devs on xwiki are not enough to do that. This is the > reason we dropped this strategy in the past and decided to release the > whole platform together with the same version. > > As part of this the technical debt is being increased since supporting > several versions and old versions means doing hacks. > > If you see another possibility that doesn’t require more work please raise > it here. > > We need to progress and have CKEditor and Tour bundled in 8.2M2(which is > already started) and thus, barring any negative comments, we’ll start the > move next week. > > Thanks > -Vincent > >> On 07 Jun 2016, at 15:39, Guillaume Delhumeau < > guillaume.delhumeau(a)xwiki.com&gt; wrote: >> >> It also means to move the tour application in that old branches too. >> >> 2016-06-07 13:59 GMT+02:00 Vincent Massol &lt;vincent(a)massol.net&gt;et>: >> >>> >>>> On 07 Jun 2016, at 10:27, Vincent Massol &lt;vincent(a)massol.net&gt; wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>>> On 07 Jun 2016, at 09:37, Guillaume Delhumeau < >>> guillaume.delhumeau(a)xwiki.com&gt; wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Moving Tour Application into platform makes sense to me (it becomes a >>>>> critical component and deserves a proper support). >>>> >>>> For me, it’s really about the definition of what the XWiki github org >>> represents. Right now with the new strategy == “Everything needed for > the >>> default XWiki runtime, a.k.a base/default flavor” (what we’ve been > calling >>> XE so far but that we’ll slim down a bit, for example by removing the > Blog >>> app and move it to contrib). >>>> >>>> Now we could still decide to have some flavor in contrib and have the >>> tour app included in that flavor but not in “the default XWiki > runtime”. In >>> practice this would mean promoting this flavor instead of the > base/default >>> flavor. The question will arise anyway when we next talk about other >>> flavors that we may want to have in contrib such a KB flavor, workgroup >>> flavor, web flavor, etc. >>>> >>>>> However, the current >>>>> application supports XWiki >= 6.4.1. By moving it to platform, we will >>> only >>>>> support the last XWiki version. >>>> >>>> This is a tough topic indeed. >>> >>> Actually in practice we would support not only the last XWiki version > but >>> also the LTS (i.e. 7.4.x + 8.x). If we wanted to support 6.4.x we could > (we >>> still have a stable-6.4.x branch ATM that we were supposed to remove) > but >>> it would mean changing our support strategy to support more branches… > and >>> it means supporting the whole platform for 6.4.x, not just one > extension… >>> >>> Thanks >>> -Vincent >>> >>> >>>> For the tour there’s the solution of keeping it in contrib and >>> introducing a flavor but for CKEditor it’s harder to justify that it’s > not >>> part of the base flavor IMO but maybe it’s possible and we would offer > only >>> the wiki editor in the base flavor. Of course we could modify our >>> functional tests fwk to support running on various versions of the >>> dependencies and have CI builds to ensure that an extension works with > all >>> versions but it’s not perfect and it would mean that for the first time > we >>> would have code in the xwiki github org that would not use the latest >>> APIs/latest JDK features. >>>> >>>> The other option is Marius’s, i.e. accept that we hand-pick some >>> extensions from contrib that we bundle in the base/default flavor such > as >>> the Tour app, CKEditor integration, etc. In this case, we would just > need >>> to redefine what “xwiki github org” means. Saying “core component” would >>> not be enough, it would needs a more precise definition. >>>> >>>> Interesting topic ;) >>>> >>>> Any other option that we have? >>>> >>>> Thanks >>>> -Vincent >>>> >>>>> 2016-06-06 15:31 GMT+02:00 Vincent Massol &lt;vincent(a)massol.net&gt;et>: >>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>>> On 06 Jun 2016, at 15:24, Marius Dumitru Florea < >>>>>> mariusdumitru.florea(a)xwiki.com&gt; wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 3:58 PM, Vincent Massol &lt;vincent(a)massol.net&gt; >>>>>> wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>> On 06 Jun 2016, at 14:50, Marius Dumitru Florea < >>>>>>>> mariusdumitru.florea(a)xwiki.com&gt; wrote: >>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>> On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Alexandru Cotiuga < >>>>>>>>> alexandru.cotiuga(a)xwiki.com&gt; wrote: >>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>> Hello all, >>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>> As it was decided already, a Homepage Tour have to be > implemented. >>>>>>>> However, >>>>>>>>>> no option regarding the place where the Tour Application should > be >>>>>>>> added as >>>>>>>>>> dependency was discussed. >>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>> There are some possible options: >>>>>>>>>> 1) XWiki Enterprise >>>>>>>>>> 2) XWiki Platform Distribution >>>>>>>>>> 3) XWiki Platform Helper >>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>> 4) Is there any option to have the Tour Application as a part of >>> the >>>>>>>> Core ? >>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>> What would be the best way to include the Contrib applications in >>>>>> XWiki? >>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>> On this topic (sorry if I hijack your thread) I was wondering why >>> don't >>>>>>>> we >>>>>>>>> have dependencies from platform/enterprise to contrib. We have > lots >>> of >>>>>>>>> third party dependencies, contrib could be considered as such. >>>>>> Moreover, >>>>>>>>> we're in the process of moving non-core (vertical) extensions out > of >>>>>>>>> platform to contrib. It would be a pity to move something from >>> contrib >>>>>> to >>>>>>>>> platform and then back to contrib. I have the same issue with the >>>>>>>> CKEditor >>>>>>>>> Integration extension. We want CKEditor as the default editor, >>> bundled >>>>>>>> with >>>>>>>>> the default distribution, but do we need to move it to platform? >>> Same >>>>>> for >>>>>>>>> the Welcome Tour. >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> I’d personally not like this for the following reasons: >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>>> 1) I like that the XWiki runtime is all released at once with all >>>>>>>> extensions making it using the same versions and verified to work >>>>>> together. >>>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> XWiki runtime has lots of third party dependencies. Bootstrap, Solr, >>>>>>> jQuery, just to name a few. I don't see how having the source code > in >>> our >>>>>>> repo (platform) makes a difference at runtime when the >>>>>>> integration/functional tests verify they work together. >>>>>> >>>>>> Because they don’t! :) Just check any extension in contrib and you’ll >>> see >>>>>> their func test (when they have some!) don’t test that they work with >>> the >>>>>> latest version of XWiki… >>>>>> >>>>>>> 2) Support. The XWiki runtime is supported by the XWiki Core Dev > Team. >>>>>>>> Extensions in contrib are not supported by the XWiki Core Dev Team. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> >>>>>>> So the FAQ application you moved out of platform is no longer >>> supported >>>>>> by >>>>>>> the XWiki Core Dev Team? >>>>>> >>>>>> Correct. >>>>>> >>>>>>> The extension page >>>>>>> > http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/FAQ+Application >>>>>>> doesn't reflect this. >>>>>> >>>>>> I added my name to the list as a supporter. I’ve kept “XWiki Dev > Team” >>>>>> because it's a past authors and it wouldn’t make sense to remove it. >>> But >>>>>> yes it’s no longer officially supported by the XWiki Core Dev Team. >>>>>> >>>>>> Note that e.x.o doesn’t say who maintains a given extension, it just >>> says >>>>>> who participated to developing it ;) We’re currently missing the info >>> on >>>>>> whether the extension is actively supported and by whom. FTR > Confluence >>>>>> does this with a “supported” label that you can hover over and > provides >>>>>> info. For example: >>>>>> >>> > https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/nl.avisi.confluence.plugins.numbe… >>>>>> >>>>>> Thanks >>>>>> -Vincent >>>>>> >>>>>>> In addition xwiki-contrib is very open and anyone can make >>> modifications >>>>>>>> there and quality is thus harder to guarantee. >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> We defined the xwiki github organization as containing horizontal >>>>>> modules, >>>>>>>> ie modules that can be required for any flavor and both CKEditor > and >>> the >>>>>>>> Tour Application fit the need. By opposition to vertical modules >>> which >>>>>> make >>>>>>>> sense only for some use cases (like the Meeting Manager app) and > not >>> by >>>>>>>> default in XE. We have the option of having flavors in contrib for >>>>>> those if >>>>>>>> we want though. For CKEditor it’s not a good thing since we’d like >>> it by >>>>>>>> default. >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> One alternative (which I’m not fond of at all) would be to have >>> ckeditor >>>>>>>> as a separate git repo in the xwiki github organization. >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> Thanks >>>>>>>> -Vincent >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>> Thanks, >>>>>>>>> Marius >>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>> Thanks, >>>>>>>>>> Alex