Hi, Jay.
On Oct 16, 2008, at 8:28 PM, Jay D. McHugh wrote:
Hello all,
With the discussion of where the JEE 6 development will be done, I
realized (again) that we never released 2.0.3.
The only thing that kept us from releasing 2.0.3 was an exception that
only occurred under stress testing the server (a
ConcurrentModificationException).
We scuttled the whole 1.2 release for similar reasons. Perhaps we should
work on learning from our own history.
And, recently, when we added a number of security patches that were the
driver for releasing 2.1.3 - the same security patches were put into the
2.0.x codestream as well.
Should we put out one last release of 2.0.x and then officially
encourage anyone on a level lower than 2.1.x to upgrade? I think that
is probably what we should do. At this point, there is a range of work
being applied to 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x and soon 3.0.x (or however we
version the upcoming JEE 6).
If you, and/or some other community member(s), are motivated to prepare
a 2.0.3 release, you'd certainly have my support. I'm sure you'd have
the community's support, also.
Given the security fixes that you mention, I think it would be nice to
have an actual release that contains them.
Also, do we have an official 'support period'? Would it be worthwhile
to discuss implementing one if we don't? Letting our users know that we
intend to support a particular major.minor release (bug fixes only)
would make it easier for them to plan which version they want to
implement against and plan/schedule their server upgrades. Maybe we
would specify a window of '12 months after the next higher minor
release'. Version 2.1.0 was released this February, so 2.0.x 'official'
support would end next February. Of course if someone felt like
continuing to make fixes (and they had someone to run TCKs against them)
then 'unofficial' support may run longer.
We've never established an official support period. I'm not too sure
that we need one. If you disagree, then I'm all ears. Or, if our user
community feels that it would be helpful, then I'd certainly give it my
consideration. Personally, I think we've done a pretty good job in
merging fixes back into our older releases. I haven't seen that the lack
of a support policy was inhibiting user adoption.
As long as we have a stable newer release (e.g. 2.1.x) release to point
to, shifting our focus towards our newer releases doesn't seem too bad
to me. If there had been user requests for a 2.0.x release, I think we
would have generated a new 2.0.x release.
Our resources are being spread -really- thin. And as a result, 2.0.x
has been nearly abandoned. We have security fixes that were put in this
September, but no release in the last 12 months. When 2.2.x is finally
released and the JEE 6 work begins in earnest - I have a feeling that
2.1.x will begin to fall by the wayside as well.
I expect that you are correct. Personaly, I doubt that we'll ever
maintain more than two release branches simultaneously (e.g. 2.0/2.1, or
2.1/2.2; etc).
Regardless - I mainly wanted to know if anyone thought that we should go
ahead and do a final release on 2.0.x. I think the security fixes make
it worthwhile. But then, maybe we should officially set an end for 2.0.
Any thoughts?
I second the motion for Jay to be the release manager... ;-)
--kevan
