----- Original Message -----
From: "Jacopo Cappellato" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2012 10:48 AM
Subject: Re: Some thoughts on OFBiz demo instances
On Feb 26, 2012, at 8:20 PM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
From: "Jacopo Cappellato" <[email protected]>
Hi Jacques,
On Feb 26, 2012, at 11:34 AM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
So, to be consistent, we should swap our stable demo from 09.4 to 10.04 and keep 09.04 as old demo like Christian began to work
on it. We will see ASAP I guess...
We will then also update the index page to let people know they can still test/use the oldest demo (would be 09.04 until next
swap).
thanks for bringing up this topic, it was the next in my todo list.
There are a few things to discuss about the way we have setup our demos:
* we publish a link to the trunk demo from the main page: this is very useful for developers but I doubt it is compliant with
the ASF policies; I propose to keep the demo but remove the link from the site pages (we will keep the info in the Wiki and
share the url in Jira or dev list communications)
Are you sure ASF has policies about what should be demoed and what should not? But finally if we would want both it's more a
resource issues, see below...
There is no policy that prevents us from publishing a demo of unreleased code (i.e. not officially signed and approved for
distribution by the PMC): it is still our responsibility to not induce *users* (but developers are fine!) to use unreleased code.
What I would like to avoid is something like this:
* new user: "hey demo-trunk is great, I like feature XYZ, where can I download this
software?"
* committer: "feature XYZ is only available from trunk, please checkout and use
that"
So my point is: why are we demoing the trunk to users (the ofbiz main page is mostly addressed to them) if the users will not be
able to use the code until is released (and this could take up to a year)? If, as you mention, it is a useful resource for
developers (and I completely agree with you) we should probably move the urls (or at least clarify the labels) to another place in
order to avoid any confusion.
Agreed, trunk should be keeped as demo but removed from main page
* instead of demoing releases we are actually demoing release branches; this is less critical than the above point but still not
completely ok with the ASF policies; we can address this in one of the following ways:
a) ignore the problem for now (having a running instance of each of the release branches is useful for developers but also for
users)
Yes, really. It's easier for both parts to exchanges about popping issues. I'm ok to be at the service of users, but I wonder if
it's worth the effort on this aspect...
b) build the demos on latest official releases instead of branches; and possibly add new instances for the branches as well (but
publish, in the indexpage, the url to the official releases only)
We have not enough places for more than 3 demos. Users can build their own demos locally. Of course unofficial demo servers could
be used, but it has been proved in the past that it's easier to have only Apache demos to maintain... Things are pretty stable
for a while (apart some unexplained Derby issues recently), of course running real realeas unstead would not change that much.
Only that we would lose the very handy part for committers (3 instances running is great).
c) hide the links to the demo instances from the main page
* personally (but this is minor) I don't like the names: "demo-trunk", "demo-old"... I would prefer a cleaner approach where the
names are neutral like "test1", "test2" etc... or "demo1", "demo2" etc... we will then decide what to publish on them
* I don't like the name "stable release" because we have actually several stable release that are valid at the same time:
currently 09.04.02 and 10.04 are both stable releases; soon we will also have 11.04.01 stable release
demo-trunk and demo-stable name were 1st suggested by infra. Then we agreed on
demo-old for the penultimate
Yeah, I remember... and this doesn't help me to like them more :-)
I can't do more :o)
To summarize: if we want to keep 3 instances to simplify the work of OFBiz developers rather than users then we should probably
have:
demo-trunk --> trunk
demo-stable --> 11.04 branch
demo-old --> 10.04 branch
because these are the 3 active branches (even if we still don't have a release
from 11.04, but this should come soon).
But as you can see the names don't make much sense as 10.04 is not "old" and 11.04 is not
more "stable" than 10.04
Actually it was my idea to have 3 instances running. Intially infra decided for the names, but IIRW old was our own decision and
there is no associated DNS yet. I think infra will be reluctant to change names/DNS for stable and trunk.
What we could do is to use demo-stable to demo the really last stable release and ask infra for another DNS (demo-recent?) for us
(devs) to associate the last recent branch
Only demo-stable would have a link from main page, the others would be from
wiki (repos page?)
My 2 cts
Jacques
Kind regards,
Jacopo
Summary:
1) demos are useful to users and developers
2) links to demos for users should be shown in the ofbiz site; links to demos for developers should be kept in the dev
list/Jira/wiki
We would need more resources and I doubt infra will agree. Same issues for the
2 points below
To be discussed more... ;o)
Jacques
3) demos for users should be based on official releases only: 09.04.02, 10.04
4) demos for developers should be based on trunk and active release branches,
currently: trunk, 10.04, 11.04 (and soon 12.04)
Kind regards,
Jacopo
