I totally agree that not taking features in a branch should come with
appropriate warning. I would note that it’s been said for quite a while that
not all features will make it into WiX v3.x and Bob’s blog post suggests that
WiX v3.9 should be ramping down. That sounds like the beginnings of warnings…
if people agree. Again, Bob’s making the ultimate call here so I’m just
stirring the pot a little bit to get ideas about how we are doing.
Anyway, I believed we all agreed that breaking changes need to go to v4.0. The
feature we started discussing is a breaking change that requires use of some
fun COM versioning techniques to avoid the breaks. That kinda’ tipped over
from “small feature” to “big feature” in my head. Again, as I noted below, I
haven’t looked at the changes I’m just proposing that maybe this feature needs
to move to WiX v4. Already, we’re talking about re-implementing the feature
differently in WiX v4.
It will become increasingly difficult to port features from v3.x to v4.x.
That makes the transition from one major version to the next major version very
hard. Derek and I had a very long conversations over many months during the
transition from v2 to v3. It was not easy to realize the best for the project
was to move forward not constantly maintain backwards.
At some point we need to generally agree about how we want to focus our efforts.
If the answer is, “We want to focus our efforts on adding backwards compatible
features to WiX v3.x for the next year or two years or three years or whatever
(and port opportunistically to WiX v4.0)” then we can decide that. If the
answer is, “We will do feature work in WiX v4.0 and purely maintain stability
and VS parity in WiX v3.x” that’s something very different.
Whatever we decide will have major implications to the future of the WiX
toolset.
_______________________________________________________________
FireGiant | Dedicated support for the WiX toolset |
http://www.firegiant.com/
From: Sean Hall [mailto:r.sean.h...@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2014 11:01 AM
To: WiX toolset developer mailing list
Subject: Re: [WiX-devs] Compatibility and style discussion
I think that if you are going to stop taking features in a branch, you need to
give sufficient warning beforehand. I don't know how long that should be, but
if the pull request was submitted before you gave warning it should be accepted
(unless it's a massive change like my 4299 pull request).
When I was talking about making 4.0 stable by the time 3.9 releases, that was
assuming that you stop taking feature requests in 3.x after that. I actually
don't want to stop taking feature requests in 3.x any time soon. If the
developer submitting the feature does the work of submitting separate pull
requests, I don't see why it can't be accepted in 3.x and 4.x. I don't see why
you would do things like add support for "VS-Next" but not take other feature
requests.
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 12:39 PM, Rob Mensching
<r...@firegiant.com<mailto:r...@firegiant.com>> wrote:
I basically agree with your classifications.
So in my comments, I was channeling Bob’s latest blob post:
http://www.joyofsetup.com/2014/04/25/to-wix-v3-9-and-beyond/ that suggested now
is no longer the time to be adding features to WiX v3.9. Definitely more Bob’s
call than mine but I was playing devil’s advocate (because someone has too… and
usually it’s Bob. <smile/>)
I also feel that WiX v3.10 should be what you call a maintenance branch but I
suppose that depends a little on what the heck Visual Studio does next. Maybe
WiX v3.11 can be solely targeted to support VS-Next?
Given that there has been very little activity in WiX v4.0 besides what we’ve
done at FireGiant, I doubt it will be possible to make WiX v4.0 stable at the
same time we release WiX v3.9. However, I don’t know why that matters. WiX
v4.0 shouldn’t be more than 6-9 months out (I hope closer to 6 than 9 since we
originally stated v4.0 should go out summer or early fall). That means any
features going there should be going there quickly.
Basically, I’m once again suggesting we need to shift our focus from adding
features to WiX v3.x to adding features to WiX v4.0 and solely fixing bugs in
WiX v3.x. Note, this is just my suggestion (Bob still makes call on in/out for
WiX v3.x) but I’m curious if others think I’m way off base.
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http://www.firegiant.com/
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