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

[Richie]

Well, well, /sak, hold on! 
We do have interest in the 4.2.x series. Have a heart sak, it is well enuf difficult to maintain 5.x ;-)! 
 
Richie




---- Sergio A. Kessler<sergiokessler at gmail.com> wrote ---- 

  Mat,

v4.x would not be abandoned while there is people interested in
maintaining it, that's all needed in open source, interested and
executive people...
it can be mantained forever while this condition is met...

and I agree with you that there was (is ?) an utterly lack of
receptive response to community developers from the core team, and the
project was crying for a fork, but all those people creating private
forks also lacked the balls to create a serious *public* fork...

I mean, if you are going to fork, then fork in all it's glory...

those people that never submitted a patch, never figthed for more open
development, created their own private branch, and then came up here
whining, are ... well, whiners IMO

those who want to mantain v4.x just need to step up and do something about it...

cheers,
/sergio

On 7/11/06, Matthew Brichacek <mmbrich at fosslabs.com> wrote:
> > [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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