Hi, There's been a lot of discussion about release strategy and componentization lately, and I've been trying to figure out how to fit all the different requirements into a single solution for Jackrabbit 1.5+. Here's what I have in mind...
First, the main requirements for componentization: * The codebase should be reasonably modular based on exposed functionality and required dependencies * Component release cycles should be independent except as constrained by functional dependencies But also: * It should be easy to download (or checkout) and build all of Jackrabbit * A Jackrabbit installation should have a clear version number that identifies the exact contents of the installation To cover all of these requirements I propose: * We keep a single release cycle for all of Jackrabbit (including a single trunk,branches,tags structure, single Jira project, etc.) * Each component within Jackrabbit trunk (and branches) has an independent version number that is only increased based on actual changes in the component * Thus a "Jackrabbit release" contains a collection of different component versions that are known to work well together * When making a release, only those components that have been modified (and thus have a new version number) are deployed to the Maven repository * Release notes will contain a list of included component versions and the changes to each component The effects of this policy would be: * Downstream projects like Sling that use direct Maven dependencies to Jackrabbit components have an easier time tracking actual changes in the components * The concepts "Jackrabbit release" and "Jackrabbit version" are still simple to grasp and use for example when reporting or reproducing issues * There's still a single trunk where development of all components occurs Applied to the Jackrabbit 1.4.x release cycle, this would have given us the following releases: * Jackrabbit 1.4.1, including core 1.4.1 * Jackrabbit 1.4.2, including core 1.4.2 * Jackrabbit 1.4.3, including jcr-commons 1.4.1 and jcr-rmi 1.4.1 * Jackrabbit 1.4.4, including core 1.4.3 * Jackrabbit 1.4.5, including core 1.4.4 * Jackrabbit 1.4.6, including core 1.4.5 Also, each release would have contained updated versions of aggregate components like jackrabbit-webapp and jackrabbit-jca, whose version numbers would thus follow the top level version number. WDYT? BR, Jukka Zitting
