[Vtigercrm-developers] 4.2.4 where to start?

Matthew Brichacek mmbrich at fosslabs.com
Wed Feb 1 22:37:45 PST 2006


On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 21:43 -0800, Richie wrote:

> a) Let us hold our head above water for sometime more and wait for 5.0 to be
> out. I do not expect that 5.0 will take till summer to stabilize. I do expect that it
> will take at the max April to be out as of today. We are not going to pump 
> in any great features as we used to do earlier. So, that is a saving!  
> 
Are you serious?   How can we leave such a lame duck out there?  Call me
old-school but I think 5.x should be halted until 4.x is fixed and
stable enough to keep people off your back while you work on 5.x.


> b)   The amount of effort going on to give patch4 is not small and I feel
> it is better to fix things on a case by case basis. I am trying here to make
> things simpler and should have a plan by the end of the day. We can take
> the fixes that we have put into the Dev3 release and integrate on top of
> the 4.2.3 release or vice-versa. That should solve most of the issues. However,
> I need to check the effort-estimate here.
> 
That's fine, in this case I think considered cases should be any
critical, showstopper or major bugs.  As far as merging forward to
something that has more bugs fixed than 4.2.3, great!  Not many people
wanted to start with our code base, which is fine, that was mostly a
band-aide and we would have lost all the tracking info that should be in
the SCM system right now.  Anything that can be put forward that at
least gets us a little bit a head of 4.2.3 _and_ has the check-in
information would be great.


> Please note, I repeat, all of this is simply because we did not intend to
> release 4.2.4. This, is yet another on-the-run demand that we are facing, hence
> it is painful. I do not deny that we did not follow proper industry wide standards
> but we are willing to learn.
I don't see how this is an on-the-run demand.  Downloads have
skyrocketed, forums posts are exploding, your user base is swelling.
Now they get a lame duck security release and all development halts
while 5.x is being cooked?  I suspect someone spoke up about this
already, had I been paying attention I would have made just as much
noise, only sooner.


>  JLee and JeffK have been asking for the release namings changes
> and we are working on those. We have changed the release naming as a start,
> the source code naming was incorrect, I agree and proper action will be
> taken to correct it.
> 
Thats great because there is very little rhyme or reason behind the
current naming convention and now package maintainers are starting to
speak up.  If we stop these folks from doing what they came to do, we
can kiss a lot of users good-bye. 


> We are more than okay with having volunteers take up responsibility
> for the release handling, bug fix handling , etc. The more hands
> we have, the better it is. 
> 
I've already said that you can count me in as fully accountable for 4.x
maintenance but I won't maintain this stream if it's going to be wrote
off in favor of 5.x, which will have a breaking-in period of at least 3
months and as long as a year before it passes for production use in most
organizations.
Some people will jump to 5.x right away, usually these are your early
adopters, but what about the majority of other users out there that have
spent a lot of time/money/both on custom mods or making 4.x 'just right'
for their business?  They don't even have the option of a support
contract through vtiger right now let alone maintaining it on their own
since the base they were depending on to merge back and pick fixes up
from has gone dead.


> Finally, I still respect you Matt. There is no 'hate' for you anywhere
> only
> respect. These are flaws that you pointed out in the system.
> That is only fair.
> 
I expected this response and this is exactly why I don't think this is a
lost cause that has to fork.  I know we can turn 4.x around and save
everyone who has choose to support 4.x for their customers and users
from having made a bad choice.

Matt




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