Re: [xwiki-devs] Call for test Extension Manager

Hi xwikiers, I just add clustering support which was the last big peace of framework that was blocking a first fully functional version of Extension Manager. I will now dedicate my time to write tests and fix bugs and small improvements I find and try to fix some UI bugs too if Sergiu does not have time. I also have some improvement work in XWiki Repository and finally make extension.xwiki.org fully based on standard XWiki Repository and not have custom version anymore. During the 3.5 and 4.0 timeframe it would be nice to get as much tests and reports as possible on what is not working or still blocker in term or usability so that we get a nice and strong first version we can advertise in 4.0. There is obviously lots of possible improvements some of which you can find on http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/ExtensionManager (and I need to add more things in there) but I would like to limit to a fully working minimum for 4.0 and then do a priority survey on the many new features and improvements ideas. Here are the grey areas I know about and on which I'm going to concentrate on writing tests: * automatic xar merging is a quick implementation not excessively tested. Also the string properties content merging is not able to merge modification done on the same line which is not nice when things like the title is customized in the wiki and also changed in the new version of the xar. Right now in doubt the merge always take the new version when there is a conflict so that nothing is lost since it's easy to get back the previous version from the history. Also I'm not going to have time to work on a real manual conflict resolution UI for this timeframe, not alone at least. * clustering is a bit young ;) Also it expect all members to have the exact same constraints, if for any reason an extension is installed to a member and fail on another it could create quite a mess if that's an important extension. * it's not very hard to add versions and dependencies in XWiki Repository but it require using object editor which is not very nice for all profiles of users (now it's generally done by the developer of the extension so not a basic user either). Will try to work on that if I have some time left.

Thanks, -- Thomas Mortagne