[Vtigercrm-developers] An Impassioned Plea from an VTiger Integrator

Matthew Brichacek mmbrich at fosslabs.com
Tue Jul 11 18:58:10 PDT 2006


> [snip]
> >
> > Our current installation is a heavily-modified (and I do mean HEAVILY)
> > modified 4.3.2 installation. To be honest, I painted myself into a bit
> > of a corner with the way I implemented our code changes, such that
> > upgrading to newer versions is a formidable challenge.
> 
> this is a mistake many people do.
> you have choosed to fork the project instead of trying to work with
> the community.
> 
> and all this people end up in the same corner as you...  :-)
> 
While I would normally agree 100% with Sergio on this point, I think we
need to take the history of this project into consideration and maybe
look at the bigger picture.

There was a point in this project where you could come along, see a
project with a fairly vibrant community forming, an interesting product
being developed and a complete lack of direction and management.  This
type of environment is ripe for internal forks and the fact that the
project didn't fork into a new OSS project is nothing short of a miracle
(seriously!).

I think Dennis is just the first one to cry out for help publicly, there
are probably many more out there like him (I know of 6).  The system
integrators had a choice to make...  Stand behind the OSS project in all
it's glory and be at the mercy of a project with no direction or
leadership, or fork and be in charge of their own destiny.  While in
most cases I would say you're loony for privately forking a strong OSS
project, in those cases I would say it was a justifiable move (i'm
biased of course).

Ok, so there have to be a _ton_ of cool features and ideas floating
around in all these private forks and I think the project managers
should make a full effort to get these integrators back into the
community and help them get their features in 5.x.  Why not put them in
4.x?  Here are the options as far as I see them for people who have
forked from 4.x:

1) Keep running with your own 4.x fork even after the community drops
4.x in favor of 5.x.  Good luck, have fun, and let us know how that
works out :).

2) Submit patches for all your features into 4.x, get them integrated,
then submit them for 5.x (or hope some wonderful soul did it for you).
If you have to submit them yourself after you've done 4.x, chances are
you will miss the final release of 5.x and will be in a stable period
that may be harder to get your features into.

3) If not already done, stabilize your 4.x fork and get busy forward
porting everything to 5.x.  You'll need to create your own upgrade path
for your company/customers but IMHO you're chances of success are better
in this case.  Some of your features may not be accepted, but maybe the
underlying framework that you need to enable those features can be, or
if you're lucky, the API will do what you need (don't hold your breath).

It really comes down to options 2 and 3, and who wants to double all
their work when you know damn well that 4.x is going to be abandoned now
that 5.x shows the promise it does.  And I mean that with absolutely no
disrespect for the people working hard on maintaining 4.x for the
community.  Will 4.x be maintained forever?  I highly doubt it, once 5.x
stabilizes and upgrade paths are figured out we'll certainly want those
developer resources moved to 5.x right?

About code comments:
I'm in no position to preach about code comments, but I am getting
better at it (code comments that is :).  What I think we could use _way_
more than code comments is a sane API with at least _some_
standardization and logic to it. But I don't have the time to do it or
fix the millions of things that will break, so I'll just shut up now.

Matt






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