[sakai2-tcc] [maint] Maintenance Branches: Enhancement vs Bug Merges

[csev]

On Jan 5, 2011, at 9:53 AM, Seth Theriault wrote:

> Anthony Whyte wrote:
> 
>> Moreover, encouraging schools to remain on older 
>> branches because we might sprinkle them occasionally with new 
>> stuff while at the same time neglecting to merge fixes into 
>> these branches in a timely manner is not, under current 
>> conditions, in the Community interest (have a look in Jira at 
>> the current backlog of 2.6.x and 2.7.x closed/resolved issues 
>> that need merging).
> 
> I think this is an important point. If we don't have the time and 
> people to manage bug fixes, how do we have the time and people 
> for features/enhancements if bug fixes are supposedly a priority?

I really hope that this will ultimately be a rather rare occurrence - much more rare than a school pulling code from the trunk into their local branch.

Let me give and example of what I would like to see in 2-7-x and 2-8-x - that might galvanize the discussion a bit.

I would love to move the neo portal features:

https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-19455

Into 2.7 and 2.8 so Hedrick can start to increasingly use those features for 2-7 schools that want to use his LB before 2.9.  I need this in systems and latent long before Chuck H starts coding so he can assume it.  I don't want to have to patch one at a time.

It is fully controlled by a property that defaults off - has no effect on storage and nothing would affect performance.  It's risk and testing load would be about as much as most bug fixes.

But it *is* a new feature.

Now it does not have a test plan and if I were to propose this under the new regime, I would be expected to provide a test plan - which makes perfect sense to me.

I would also like to back-port the expando code to minimize navigation to 2.7 (it is in 2.8) - all with a similar argument.  Expando is a little more involved than Neo - but in a sense that is a great reason to patch once and test carefully and do the patch / test with me involved in the process rather than each school trying to separately shoe-horn it into their local 2-7 branch.  Again a test plan would be essential here.

I am quite nervous about this and I think that we should expect that the first few uses of this new policy will be subject to a lot of scrutiny - and if there is any "smoke in the air", we will likely say 'no' - experience will be our guide.

I am generally nervous about DB changes unless they are *REALLY* simple.

/Chuck