On 22 Jun 2016, at 20:13, Eduard Moraru <enygma2002(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 12:57 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
On 22 Jun 2016, at 10:02, Marius Dumitru Florea
<
mariusdumitru.florea(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
+1
On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 7:00 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>
wrote:
> 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).
>
I don't think we need to release the Default Flavor more often than the
Base Flavor because with this new strategy the users can upgrade
individual
extensions (those that are not in the Base
Flavor) without upgrading the
WAR.
As I said, if we find some important bug (for example) and this bug is
only in one of the 3rd party extensions, it would be a pity not to release
just the Default Flavor IMO and wait for 2 months more. Even if users can
upgrade their extensions, it’s better that users new to XWiki
download/install the best possible version right away instead of having to
upgrade.
We’ll see when the need arises but I don’t think we should stop ourselves
from this possibility. Technically this means putting the Default Flavor in
a separate github repo (same as xwiki-enterprise being in a separate repo).
We need to discuss how we do it:
- consider it’s XE for now and just add the 2 deps of Tour and CK to XE
- introduce a new repo for the default flavor and do the build for it and
deprecate XE in favor of it. For now we probably need to hardcode the
flavor id in the platform WAR till we’re ready to have the flavor selection
screen at startup (and for HSQLDB/Jetty packaging we need a hard-coded
flavor anyway).
I`m personally sensing that we may have a bit of a confusion here between
the notion of separate release cycles and the repo in which an extension
should be located.
AFAIU, the top priority and the actual problem that we want to fix here
(mainly for our users and XWIki`s flexibility) is to allow extensions to
have independent release cycles. Moving stuff to contrib just got somehow
into the discussion as a consequence of the old way we used to handled
things (xwiki org = monolith, single version; contrib org = distributed;
independent versions).
In the past, people (including myself) were pushing to move modules to
contrib for the independent versioning feature of contrib, but not
necessarily for the "openness for anyone to commit" feature of contrib.
That last feature was actually a downside to the quality aspect. If we
handle independent versioning within the xwiki GitHub organization, then we
will no longer have this downside and we will be able to properly control
the quality. This would mean that the Default Flavor would be in a repo
under the xwiki org (similar to xwiki-enterprise, as Vincent's proposal)
and I would even go as far as suggesting that all the dependencies of the
Default Flavor should be located/moved within the xwiki org, perhaps in
some xwiki-extensions repo (that we were talking about at some point).
I agree that this might sound a bit like going in circles, but IMO it`s not
entirely true, now that we introduce independent versioning in the
discussion, since it fixes a lot of problems we have in the previous
discussions were we were wrongly using Contrib, to compensate for it, since
the xwiki org was a big monolith.
Now what happens to the remaining modules inside xwiki-platform and the
Base Flavor, I would guess that, at least at the beginning, they will
continue to function as a monolith, at least until we decide to tackle the
notion of "core" dependencies and if we want to do something about them
(see my note about this on the previous thread).
WDYT?