[Building Sakai] Change the Sakai CLE release date policy ?

[yleny at laposte.net]

Sam said :

>The person from UCDavis writing this blog post has a poor understanding of the way Sakai is updated and is most likely >referring to their local institution's release of Sakai as opposed to the global updating of Sakai.  Sakai code is updated every >day of the year, and after the QA team verifies issues, the fixes are merged into maintenance branches on a weekly basis.  I >would argue that critical bugs are addressed quite quickly in the community, and institutions that are interested in rolling out >bug fixes should be rolling out patches several times every term. 

The person from UCDavis person has this opinion because you do not see several things as developer :
1) The web page https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Sakai+Release+Date+list was created in june 2014 and was missing in the sakai documentation. With this web page, a sakai user/administrator can see that sakai CLE have
regular updates but without this web page where he can find this information ?
2) A lot of web server or appplication server administrators are not developpers and so you can not ask them to get sakai sources code, patch it, compile it and install it on the java application server. It's not their job.
They want only tagged and tested sakai binaries to install on the java application server and then they will wait the official tagged release.

For doing so, I also know that quality tests are long and difficult to pass especially with a complex software like sakai cle.
Is it possible to have a minor tagged release with binaries every two months to fix the bugs, translations or is it costing too much time for qa team and developpers ?

>If you want to help increase our velocity of maintenance branch fixes, our QA team could use more volunteers to verify issues >that have been fixed in trunk but are waiting for verification before being merged to the maintenance branch.
Interesting information if I want to improve sakai.

PS : My message is not a criticism, otherwise I would not have spent so much time on my spare (free) time to translate sakai's menus and messages in french, translate sakai 10 install documentation in french, improve english sakai 10 documentation, create english documentation or improve sakai cle wikipedia pages to promote sakai.

Best regards

Yannick

> Message du 06/08/14 17:57
> De : "Sam Ottenhoff"
> A : yleny at laposte.net
> Copie à : "Developers Sakai-Dev"
> Objet : Re: [Building Sakai] Change the Sakai CLE release date policy ?
>
> 
> The LMS Transition Initiative
> http://wheel.ucdavis.edu/lms/
> extract :
> "Frequency of Updates. Sakai has not had significant updates in years (only bug fixes), and the fixes that do occur are annual, which is not frequently enough. The LMS candidates that we are investigating update tools, add functionality, and address bugs much more frequently."
> 
> 
> The person from UCDavis writing this blog post has a poor understanding of the way Sakai is updated and is most likely referring to their local institution's release of Sakai as opposed to the global updating of Sakai.  Sakai code is updated every day of the year, and after the QA team verifies issues, the fixes are merged into maintenance branches on a weekly basis.  I would argue that critical bugs are addressed quite quickly in the community, and institutions that are interested in rolling out bug fixes should be rolling out patches several times every term.   
> 
>  
> When you take a look at all official releases of Sakai CLE web page (that I have created), grouped by branch in reverse chronological order:
> Sakai Release Date list
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Sakai+Release+Date+list
> you can see that users neeed to wait 3 months for a minor release (2.9.x) and 10 months between a major release (from 2.9.3 to 2.10.0) 
> 
> You are mis-understanding the way maintenance branches work.  The maintenance branch (2.9.x, 10.x) is updated frequently as issues are verified by our QA team.  Institutions that want frequent bug fixes should use the maintenance branches.  Institutions that want less-frequent updates can use official tags or releases (2.9.3, 10.0, 10.1).  There is no need to wait for official releases if you are interested in frequent updates. 
> 
> Is it possible to have a minor release every two months to fix the bugs, to have minor improvements and to have the latest translations ? 
> If you want frequent updates, use the maintenance branches and don't wait for official releases.  An official release is simply a group of volunteers coming together to verify, QA, and package the maintenance branch code.  If you want to help increase our velocity of maintenance branch fixes, our QA team could use more volunteers to verify issues that have been fixed in trunk but are waiting for verification before being merged to the maintenance branch. 
> --Sam 
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