[cle-release-team] [sakai2-tcc] Emerging consensus to focus on 2.10

[Charles Severance]

I think that Noah is wrong and disagree with Beth below.

We should expect a relatively small 2.9.4 release that is essential/critical bug fixes only and then a 4.0.  Starting immediately we should work towards a trunk-based 4.0 release and move 2-9-x into "maintenance mode".  We need to spend some time working on trunk and then begin to focus nearly all of our efforts of dev-testing and QA of trunk and put in as little effort as we can on 2-9-x.  Starting *today* - not nine months from now.

To those who think that we need yet-still-more new features before we are "worthy" of a 4.0 - you are *could not be more* wrong.

I would suggest that you download Sakai *2.0*, bring it up and then compare it to trunk or even 2.9.3 in terms of features, performance and look and feel.   What we have in trunk and even the 2.9.3 release bears so little resemblance to the Sakai 2.0 release that we probably should have called 2.9.3 Sakai 4.0.  Calling Sakai 2.9.3 a "minor release" of Sakai 2.0 is completely misleading and badly confusing to the marketplace.  

Please explain to me how a 2.10 release is somehow a maintenance release of that 2005 software we called "Sakai 2.0".

If you want to get a sense of what the lack of a major new version is dong to us all - look at this Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/PhilOnEdTech/status/374947773210062848

This sucks for commercial purveyors of Sakai and sucks for on-campus people trying to advocate that Sakai was not dead three years ago.  Sakai is still one of the best LMS's on the market right now and its vector is strong.  Three years ago members of the Sakai community were our own worst enemy.  We formed the TCC so we would have leadership that would not be "our own worst enemy" - but if we degrade into group-think and convince ourselves that the next major release needs to be labelled a minor release - we *have* become our own worst enemy.

We as insiders all have our little pet peeves as to what we should fix.  That is normal - all projects have that.   Things like when to declare a major new version should not be blocked by people trying to force others to work on their own pet peeves.

It time to move on.

/Chuck

On Sep 9, 2013, at 8:32 AM, Beth Kirschner <bkirschn at umich.edu> wrote:

> It is now September -- we have been debating this since the conference in June. If we don't very quickly come to consensus on a release schedule, we can pretty much forget about a major release in the first half of 2014. There is a lot of good stuff in trunk that should be QA'd and released. The longer we wait on getting trunk QA'd and released, the more problematic it will be to put out a stable release. More code change == more risk of bugs. Now is not the time for indecision. Nor is it the time for putting more into a release that's not in there now. I support Noah's approach of a 2.10 followed by a 4.0.
> 
> - Beth

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