[sakai2-tcc] Assignments 2

[Charles Severance]

Matt,

I strongly disagree with the notion that we should replace Assignments with Assignments 2.  Every time in the past we have gone from X to X2 it has been a painful experience for several reasons:

(a) The school that purports to be behind X2 turns out to be less committed to supporting the communities needs than the school supporting X1 once issues are raised with X2.  They are willing to fix things their local users find in the product but generally never have resources to fix problems other schools find.

(b) We never get a real conversion - a few schools either hack up a conversion or decide to abandon the old data - this might be fine for a few adopters making local tradeoffs  - but unacceptable for code in trunk for all 300 adopters

(c) There is never feature parity - ever.   The few schools using X2 like the additional features and so they turn a blind eye towards what is missing and are not motivated to reach feature parity once they have switched and told their users "too bad" regarding missing functionality.   The schools using X2 are happy to compromise because for some reason they prefer the new.

(d) Given that X2 is in a few places things like performance or scaling issues are seldom identified until we we drop X2 in trunk and folks upgrade and wake up with a surprised look on their face the first week of the semester when it all goes pear-shaped.   At that moment, the "fans" of X2 seem to vanish and are unwilling to fix the problems that crop up.

Believe me, if we set our minds to it, we could fix the state-related problems in Assignments 1 in a few weeks as long as folks were wiling to do a complete and thorough QA / regression test of the code.   We would have multi-tab capabilities - and eliminate these ghostly bugs that come from weird click patterns.   And it would take a month.   If we went to A2, it would take at least a year before the pain was over.  And smart schools would delay upgrade to our next release, waiting for the brave few to work out the kinks of A2.  It is like a poison pill for our next release when we are trying very hard to get more schools close to the current release and make it easier to keep up with latest releases.

If we don't have the resources / energy to QA state-rlated changes to A1 - then we absolutely do not have the resources to bring the A2 code to the level of A1 and build a seamless transition.

Those who like Assignments 2 can run it - lets not regress trunk.  Lets not make things much worse because we are afraid to fix a bug.  If we break core functionality - it is one way to force resources to be invested - but it is a bad way to do it.

/Chuck