Devs - We held a google meet up on Aug 21st to start to plan for release 1.9. TL;DR we are planning to start the formal release process on Sept 2nd. All features ready or nearly-ready should be pushed to a PR for review.
The meeting included James Dailey, Ed Cable, Adam Saghy, Alexander Vidakovic, Anjil, Bruce Tushabe, Venkata Ramaraju. - The last release was Aug 22, 2022, It is time for a new release. - Aleks has agreed again to be the Release Manager. - James and then Adam described the major changes since then in brief (e.g. Spring Batch, new Business Date, COB). Aside: to learn more, review the listserv, recently closed tickets, github changes, and quarterly board report on our infra. - The new release shall be 1.9. Lots of tickets tagged with that, specifically 230 tagged, 27 in process, 68 done, 135 hanging out in indeterminate status. James will kick off a process of pushing the ones there that were not worked on to a future release. For now, we guess that is release 1.11 ( we may or may not skip release 1.10, read one point ten) - We discussed a release strategy of another incremental release which is (largely) backward compatible for 1.9, 1.10, 1.11 and a new release discussion for 1.2 which we anticipate to be a major reworking. - Generally, we try to keep changes backward compatible and to provide a migration tool or path. - We also, post meeting, discussed that "custom modules" are a major feature/improvement which avoid git conflicts with custom code and thus improves developer experience and allows for third party integrations - this is a also a major improvement over the past year and will be part of this release. - We will continue this discussion in person at "Community over Code" conference (aka ApacheCON) in Halifax as possible, and on list. - Aleks described his plans for a re-factoring of the authentication mechanism, leveraging SpringAuth and his plans post 1.9 to do more widespread changes to the permissions concept within Fineract. - Adam brought up features that are currently in process, including work on the data tables and on down payment for loans. James proposed that we include all features that were "complete" as of July 1, 2023 and only exclude if necessary and anything past July 2023 we include as we can in this release. - On documentation, Aleks suggested that each time new code enhancements come in that there is at least a placeholder put into the document structure in the asciidoc location so that we can then note when the gaps in documentation happen. We should make this part of the PR checklist. We have volunteers willing to help with this, we need some clear guidance on what should go where. All process stuff stays on wiki, all code documentation goes into AsciiDocs. The in-between stuff we need help to decide - but clearly we need documentation for both the Developer orientation and reference and the user/business domain person. - On testing, the strategy is to use what we have to and ask the community to test adequately when we propose the release - including any front ends by Mifos that can help users test features. Testing strategies do need a separate discussion. - The plan is to thus for Aleks to send out an email on or around Sept 2nd about the release, and to vote on the release starting on Sept 16th. Let's get this done in time for Halifax. - We spoke about having a quarterly release and perhaps a designated Release Manager each quarter : Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer release manager for the year. Explicitly, this is the report out to the listserv to bring the discussion " on list". - James
