Hello koha-devel, I have some points to rise about our release process. Koha 3.8 has been released 2.5 months ago, and some libraries have reported major problems with 3.8.0. The main origin of those problems came from the fact that a large feature (hourly loans) has been pushed close to the release. It works well, but introduced many side effect: changing the issuing date field to a datetime field broke many other features because some comparison became wrong.
When Koha 3.4 has been released, we faced a similar problem, with the switch to T::T that caused many problems too (badly scoped variables in loops, translations problems) Those problems are solved quickly, but libraries that installed Koha 3.X.0 in production faced troubles. So I think we must refine our workflow. There are 2 options here: * stop pushing enhancements that are potentially harmful sooner (2 months before the release ?). What could be harmful is the RM decision. That would make 4 months for pushing ENH, and 2 months for testing. * Release the 3.X.0 saying it's a beta, could have some bugs not detected. The 3.X.1 being a RC, and the 3.X.2 being the 1st really stable version. I must say that I prefer, the 2nd option: contributors are concentrated on stabilizing 3.8, and, on the previous release, a lot of ENH have been signed off close to the release. It look like we had 2 periods: the 1st one where our strength are dedicated to stable, the 2nd one being dedicated to the next release. What is also good with the 2nd option is that it does not change a lot the current timeline and workflow. It's just a matter of announcing things. Your opinion ? PS: I must also add that, independently from this community decision, BibLibre plan to deploy most customers in 3.X.2, and I've been told by Brendan that bywatersolutions will probably wait for .3 or .4. Both of our companies having a few libraries accepting to heavily test releases early. -- Paul POULAIN http://www.biblibre.com Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08 _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
