Hi this morning in the slack Apache Royale official channel Chris Dutz asked about plans for release 0.9.7. If you see Greg and I help him to create an Apache Royale interface for pulling data from a Consumer in an IoT Apache PLC4X app. Something very cool :). He published a tweet with a video showing it.
So regarding the release, I explain that I spent many days some months ago trying to fix the CI release steps to release, but I was unable to do it. I think making changes to the Maven o Ant make the 13 steps very fragile and difficult to fix. And we need to evolve continually Maven and Ant, so that means a huge task that will require an huge amount of time that almost nobody here has. So I must say that although the work done on that front was amazing and huge maybe we need to streamline it to an standard. I know is difficult, but although we had many expectations put on the 13 step release process, after try it seems that we finally are not getting what we wanted, that is streamline the release process. This is one of the critical points that hold us to release 1.0, since not having an easy way to release means as we push 1.0 and people tries us, we'll need to be faster on releasing, and we can't wait 6 month or a year, since that we'll mean user will not want that kind of release cycle. So here is my proposal to work on a release process that allow us to release more often and more easily. Hope you all can consider it: First: We all know we want build with ANT and MAVEN. And when I refer to "all" I really mean "all". Although I'm a Maven advocate, I really appreciate the point to have ANT on place so having 2 build systems that completely works mean advantage. In fact although I use maven I build with both system daily. Second: Build does not mean Release. I think other times we discussed Release as a way to impose Maven over Ant. Or maybe that was the perception for others, but not my intention (and maybe not the intention of others). But that's not the objective. Release [1] means to us just "publication outside the development community, defined as individuals actively participating in development or following the dev list." That means that we don't need to release using Maven and Ant at the same time, we can streamline greatly the process to just releasing with Maven so we can ensure a simple process the same as any other Apache project. It means that people trying the release need to check it with Maven, but community users can continue using ANT or Maven to build or even just download the SDK and use it on his IDE of choice and don't use ANT or Maven at all. Third: The fact is the rest of projects I know all use releases and CI based on Maven, and that should point us that maybe we're trying to force something that is not standard in our industry, so if we want to make it more reliable and easy process, is normal to embrace how others are doing, since that does not mean we're throwing away a build system, since per previous point we don't want to remove ANT. Finally, Chris and I offer our time to make the easiest release process we can that let all of us release easily and often (maybe each 1-2 month?) Thanks [1] http://www.apache.org/legal/release-policy.html#release-definition -- Carlos Rovira http://about.me/carlosrovira
