7 Oct
2010
7 Oct
'10
2:56 p.m.
Hi Vincent,
On 10/07/2010 09:38 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi Caleb and all,
Here's my take:
1) I agree it's currently hard to know the compatibility of a given extension
2) Putting the XE version in the extension version is limiting IMO. Consider the
following typical use case:
-- we release XE version N and the Acme Extension version N
-- we make changes to Acme Extension
-- we release XE version N+1 and thus Acme Extension N+1
-- I'm a user with XE version N installed. I check to see if there's a new
version of the Acme Extension I use. I see Acme Extension N+1 but N+1 doesn't match my
XE version so I assume it's not going to work with XE version.
-- The problem is that this assumption is false. We would need to re-release every
extension N times whenever there are changes to it in order just to name them with the
past released XE versions...
3) We're developing an Extension Manager in charge of finding all available
extensions for you directly from your wiki and to install/upgrade them easily
4) The way the Extension Manager works is by looking at the dependency version in the
Maven POM for the extension. Thus the best practice is to use version ranges to show the
compatibility matrix of a given extension with XE core. Thus I propose several things:
-- that we start using version ranges in our extension POMs
-- that indeed we have a template on xwiki.org for users to contribute information on
whether a given extension works on a given XE release, in order to distribute the workload
of creating the compatibility matrix
-- when a user reports it work, we update the POM for the extension accordingly (same
when a user reports that it doesn't work)
Indeed, the Extension Manager will be a great improvement, but it will
solve only a *half* of the problem - it will make it much easier for the
users, but not for the developers.
Currently, Java code is handled nicely in that respect - we *always*
have a branch for the next version, we have a development practices for
introducing of incompatible changes, bugs are fixed in both trunk and
last branch, new features go to trunk etc.
But why does this scheme not apply to the applications, which also
contain code and have exactly the same problems? It seems to me that
the only reason is the huge overhead created by the fact that *each*
application has its own version and release cycle. We ship a wild mix
of applications with different core versions, and everyone who wants to
make changes to them is supposed to take care of compatibility.
IMO the way applications are currently handled is a mess, which will
only be *hidden* from the users by the Extension Manager, and the only
way to make it easy for developers is to synchronize versions and apply
the strategy we have for core to all the applications at the same time.
Of course this strategy cannot be applied to 3rd party applications, but
we will only use them, so here the Extension Manager will take care of them.
Thanks,
Alex
In conclusion I don't think we need to change the
current versioning scheme for extensions and in any case we can't control all the
extensions out there since the idea is to promote the creation of XWiki extensions outside
of the xwiki dev team and thus we need a better mechanism than one based on the name.
Note: if you wanted to put the XE version in the extension name you'd need to allow
version range syntax in the name which is a pain since you'd need to re-release
everytime you learn that your extensions works or doesn't work with a given XE release
(barring the issue with special chars for some filesystems...).
Thanks
-Vincent
On Oct 6, 2010, at 2:28 PM, Caleb James DeLisle wrote:
I have been observing problems with the
versioning scheme which we are using.
Because applications are not branched along with core, when a bugfix version of a stable
branch is
released, new versions of applications are typically pulled in. This means that
`experimental' code
is being introduced into a `stable' branch in a bugfix version. This is not the path
I would choose
but more importantly we can't honestly say that our code goes through a
milestone/release candidate
verification process if some of the code is allowed to bypass it.
This situation has caused me to make a mistake which I was able to correct during the
release
without major issue, I think the same issue is behind the release of 2 bogus versions
(2.4.1 and 2.4.2)
There is another issue, users who want to mix and match applications to build their own
wiki are
faced with a set of version numbers and no way to know what is compatible with what. A
user who I
spoke with last night had this very problem. We could publish a compatibility matrix but
if we were
to show all the versions a given application is compatible with, that would require
testing each
application version against each core version and I think we need to concentrate on
testing what
gets released in XE.
Both of these problems would be fixed if version numbers were synchronized and everything
was
branched for a release. Relevant questions which come to mind are "do we need the
capability to
release applications at separate times?" and "is there no way to do that with
synchronized version
numbers?"
Am I missing any other reasons?
Should this not become a proposal?
Caleb
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