On Jun 11, 2007, at 12:12 AM, Pavel wrote:

Just to clarify how do I see that relationship.

First off, I was talking about stable branch, not a release. Generally it is not possible to fix all major bugs and make a perfect application in just one release.
Nor it is possible when bugfixing is mixed with development.

In my understanding testing is closely related to branch when it comes to achieving stability yet avoiding development freeze.

Lets assume functional testing will start for XWiki 1.1 and all commits (development and bugfixing) would go into head only.
That is, major areas will be covered by functional testing, number of issues will be identified, and fixed at some point later.

Given that development activities will take place over the same period of time, the following result is possible:

1. Certain functionality was not covered by testing, since it appeared post 1.1. Probably it contains some issues.
2. The functionality that was covered by testing may have regressions, since lots of changes were made since 1.1.
3. Even something that was fixed may have been broken by consequent changes.

In other words, the more development effort takes place, the less value from QA cycle remains in the application.

With branch OTOH the outcome would also include more or less stable 1.1 release that ideally has all major bugs fixed.
There is a cost though. The overhead and burden of applying fixes into 2 places is something that nobody likes. And it slows down the development to some extent.

That was my vision =).

I agree. As we both said in our answers, the major issues is the overhead and burden of applying fixes in 2 places. This is an important issue because we need to go forward and we don't have that much manpower. Which is why I was saying that if 1) there are major issues (like security issues) then we should do it - if it's possible; it may not be if there have been important refactorings to trunk - and if 2) there are contributors/committers interested in making it happen.

Regarding the testing, yes you're right, we're trying to mitigate the risk of using 1.1 by:

* Adding more and more tests
* Delivering new releases every 3 weeks. So if a user using a 1.1 release find a bug and if this bug is added to jira soon enough it'll be fixed in the next release (thus within 3 weeks)

Anyway, this only represent my POV and I'm happy to change it if required :)

Thanks
-Vincent

On 6/10/07, Vincent Massol <vincent@massol.net> wrote:
Hi Pavel,

On Jun 9, 2007, at 9:49 PM, Pavel wrote:

Sorry to rise the question again, but now that functional testing is about to start, I believe decision on the subject has already been made.

Why do you say this? I don't see the relationship between that functional testing and a decision on bug fix release... ;)

I've prepared a mail for you several days ago but I hadn't sent it so far because I'm not sure about the answer. We take decisions here together and we haven't discussed this yet so this is a good time...

This is indeed an important question. I think this is a community decision and one for the current committers. My personal feeling (I only speak for myself) is currently the following:

* Most xwiki committers will probably want to work and focus on 1.1. I'm also starting to work on 2.0.
* In order for XWiki 1.1 to become even better we need the maximum of users to try 1.1.
* I think 1.1 will stay stable enough for users to migrate to it or at least to try it and migrate if they like it
* Our goal is to increase our automated test suite to reduce the risk of regression and allow users to safely move to any release we do
* We may need 1.0.x releases but that's hard to do as there aren't many active committers
* I discussed this with Sergiu and we think there are some occasions where a bug fix release should be done. One of them is when there are important security issues discovered and fixed

But I guess the real answer is: if a committer wants to do a bug release and is volunteering for leading it, I think everyone would agree. If volunteers like you can/want to contribute to a bug fix releases then I guess the likelihood that it'll happens will be high.

What do other committers think?

Thanks
-Vincent

On 5/29/07, Pavel <pagrus@gmail.com> wrote:
Vincent et all,

Now that xwiki is 1.0, are there any plans to have a bugfixing-only branch?

1.1M1 anouncement mentions both bugfixes and new features/changes. While the
former is good for stability, the latter may not be so.
For me as a person who will need to support xwiki installation it is an
important question.

Thanks,
Pavel




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Best regards,
Pavel

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