On Wednesday 5th of December 2012, the below mentioned group of people (that together represent a big part of the Swiss TYPO3 agencies) have met to discuss their needs and expectations regarding TYPO3's release cycle, the LTS strategy and to generally discuss stuff. To make it short: The meeting was a great success and showed that there's a need to meet more often in the future!
Michael Stucki started the meeting and presented the current draft that Oliver Hader, Benni Mack and Michael have come up after their meeting in Stuttgart (see Post from Michael Stucki, 2011-11-25: http://lists.typo3.org/pipermail/typo3-team-core/2012-November/052822.html).
The most urgent issues for us as agencies we collected during our meeting are the following:
- There's no clear statement that there will be a next LTS version
- If there is a next LTS version, it's not clear when it will come and how it will be supported/ousted by the then next LTS version
- Having just 6 months overlapping time between the current LTS version and it's successor is not enough
We were all happy to see, that during the meeting in Stuttgart, the most pressing issues have been recognized by the core team leaders and the proposed strategy takes them into account. In addition, we're also happy to hear that the strategy could be implemented without further funding (which would be hard to achieve right now as the budgeting process for 2013 is already running).
The following things have been noted during our discussion around the proposal that Michael presented, and at his request we'd like to share those points to give a feedback about the usage of the different versions to the core team:
- In general, we all agree that we choose stability (= longer maintenance period) over some new features - as long as we don't explicitely need that particular new feature
- We as agencies don't see a need for a 6-month release-cycle for ourselves - but we understand each developer that wants to see his newly developed feature to be released to the public faster
- We also noticed that the 6-month cycle can be a plus for us indirectly, as features are probably more stable when the next LTS is shipped (as some real-world testing/usage/feedback/optimization has happened until then)
- To underline that:
- We're running and maintaining a lot of 4.5 LTS based installations and are in general working on upgrading the remaining customer installations to 4.5 LTS
- As good a no 4.6.x installation is maintained
- some 4.7 based instlallations are maintained
- We'd prefer to upgrade customers from one LTS to the next LTS and leave the in-between-releases out
- To underline that:
- We also noticed that the 6-month cycle can be a plus for us indirectly, as features are probably more stable when the next LTS is shipped (as some real-world testing/usage/feedback/optimization has happened until then)
- This also means that we're in need of a clear announcement and strategy so we can support TYPO3 as much and transport that strategy to our customers (saying "No clue what's coming up" is no option and would affect TYPO3's reputation negative in our opinion)
- We think that our customer's requirements are met, if they get security fixes and blockers (e.g. backend not usable anymore using latest Firefox or the like), but not every single patch needs to be backported -> clear +1 for the strategy to differentiate between a "full-supported"- and a "security-and-blocker-only"-phase of the whole version lifecycle
- We think it's a good plan that 6.1 will be similar to 4.4 which was addressed to some cleanup, and the result will be that an upgrade from 6.1 to 6.2 LTS will be pretty smooth
The communication of the whole LTS and in general the releases should be optimized, we propose the following actions to be taken:
- In the chart that shows the timeline of the releases, the LTS releases could be shown as thicker bars than the releases in between to make it clear that the LTS is of big importance and is treated that way
- Versions between the LTS versions could be named e.g. "early adopter version" to underline the target audience: Users that want the newest available features
- typo3.org welcomes visitors with a bold banner regarding Neos - we think that TYPO3 CMS should deserve the first entry on the front page for the time being (this seems to have changed since the meeting and Neos is not the first item anymore, but I'm still mentioning it here for future reference).
In general we think that Neos as a product is hyped (and marketed) too strong right now which leads to discussions with end-customers that think Neos is already finished and could be used as a replacement for TYPO3 CMS already (which we think is not yet the case). We'd prefer that TYPO3 CMS would get more attention as it's the product that the broad userbase is still using for their projects.
We expected the TYPO3 Association would take a more active role in this discussion and in general by steering the whole project towards a release strategy - several attendees of our meeting mentioned that the EAB was not recognized during this process (and without noticed activity no one knows what the EAB actually did).
The main reason for our meeting was the lack of an LTS strategy. We're happy that meanwhile there is a proposal which covers our needs 100%. We'd like to give +8 for the proposal that Stucki presented and also want to thank Olly, Benni and Michael for their engagement in the TYPO3 Core Team!
- Daniel Kalt, CS2
- Reto Zahner, NewMedia
- Adrian Zimmermann, Snowflake
- Stefan Ramer, Snowflake
- Michael Stucki, CS2, EAB and TYPO3 Core Team
- Lukas Rüegg, RTP
- Rolf Luginbuel, luginbuehl.com
- Daniel Bachmann, internezzo
- Mario Rimann, internezzo