Minutes from the 8th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team¶
These minutes are also posted to the typo3.projects.v4 mailing list. If you want to comment on specific topics, feel free to reply on the list. Thanks for your participation!
May 16th, 2011
The 4.6 release team meets weekly for a Skype discussion round on the current activities. If you find this report interesting or have some comment or question about a particular topic, don't hesitate to follow-up on the thread in the v4 mailing list.
On Monday, May 16th 2011 we held our 8th meeting with the following participants:
- Xavier Perseguers (4.6 Release Manager)
- Oliver Hader (Core Team Leader)
- Benjamin Mack (4.4 Release Manager)
- Ben van't Ende (Community Manager)
Topics¶
We started our meeting by brainstorming on our feel of lack of activity in TYPO3 development. Of course development is going on and a few people are still quite active on providing patches and reviewing RFC's (many thanks) but anyway, we are forced to admit that there is objectively less activity going on "publicly".
It is of course obvious that this is related to the move to Git and Gerrit where RFC's are not posted to the Core mailing list anymore but are available for reading from http://review.typo3.org where anybody may answer to the authentication prompt by providing his/her typo3.org credentials (the ones used to report bugs and feature requests on Forge or to manage extension keys on typo3.org).
Although this reviewing system is very efficient and basically allow anybody to easily give +1 by reading and/or testing (now mapped to "Code Review" and "Verified" respectively), we all miss the sometimes informal way of reviewing patches and discuss changes we used to have in the Core mailing list. Ideally, we would like Gerrit to post to the mailing list in order for anybody to easily follow "what's going on". A suggestion is pending in Forge [1] and it seems the main obstacle is as usual manpower but in the meantime, we suggest you subscribe to some email-based feed by configuring notification in "Settings / Watched Projects" in Gerrit.
Olly pointed out that the move to Git instead of Subversion implies to take time to configure one system (using the tutorial on [2]) and that many community users did not yet "make the switch". As the tutorials are now proven to be complete, we are confident you will take the few minutes needed to (re-) configure your TYPO3 environment and your different auto-update scripts. Do not hesitate to post to one of your preferred mailing list to ask for help if needed.
Benni suggested to plan a special meeting with the release team and a few other core team members to make sure we ourselves "master" Git and Gerrit workflows. Finally, we will ask the server management team to redirect the "403 authentication failed" page you get when canceling the authentication prompt on Gerrit to redirect to some landing page on 's wiki where people would be guided by a step-by-step tutorial. Ben and Olly will take care of preparing this wiki page.
Form project¶
According to Ben and a discussion we had with Patrick, leader of the Form project [3], it should be ready by now and will hopefully be integrated soon into Core. Ben will get in touch with Patrick to plan this.
XLIFF¶
Project XLIFF [4] aims at replacing the way we deal with localization within TYPO3 by a better, state-of-the-art, approach. This project was kickstarted by Dominique but he now needs some help to push it forward. We would like to integrate his work as soon as possible and plan to backport this feature to 4.5 LTS if it proves to be stable and well-integrated. Older versions of TYPO3 are not on our radar because support for 4.4 will end in October, once 4.6 --rebase is released.
Ben will get in touch with Dominique to host the new translation server Dominique set up on our typo3.org infrastructure. Xavier and possibly François will have a meeting with Dominique before our next swiss French-speaking TUG event in Lausanne to help him integrating his work into Core.
Roles in Backend¶
Xavier suggested to forget about this idea for the time being.
Dashboard¶
Having a full-fledge dashboard is perhaps ambitious given the time-frame we have but we still aim at getting rid of prototype and script.aculo.us and this should continue with a refactoring of the backend toolbar on top using ExtJS instead.
TCEforms refactoring¶
Currently, the whole feature set is not supported and this is what prevents integration of partial work into Core as we do not want partially-working alternatives to existing ones which in the end stays forever and forces us to maintain two code bases. However, we should not forget that 4.6 is a development branch which lets us do major work without worrying too much.
Install Tool¶
Benni did some further refactoring using Fluid and, we quote him, "It just turned out to be working :-)". He is refactoring "bottom to top", recoding every page and separating them. More than half of them are already refactored. Some tests such as changing the install tool password should be performed but basics will be ready for alpha2 already. Adding a security section is most probably something that will happen for alpha3.
FAL¶
Olly will get in touch with the team to see how to integrate at least the API and a basic implementation of the current fileadmin operation which should be more than ready now into alpha2.
REST / Web Services¶
Xavier will get in touch with the team to enquire about the progress.
File Upload¶
Xavier will get in touch with the team to enquire about the progress.
BE performance¶
Steffen is planning to do some prototyping to enhance the loading mask after moving. We currently have about 56 JS files loaded and this is something to consider too to speed up the Backend, although many of them are related to prototype and script.aculo.us.
Packaging¶
Packaging of 4.6 alpha1 allowed us to find and fix some glitches in the scripts. The next releases such as the 4.5.3 planned for next week will take advantage of those bug fixes.
Dates¶
- TYPO3 4.6 alpha2 on June 14th 2011
- Feature Freeze and TYPO3 4.6 beta1 on August 2nd 2011
no new features and no exceptions after the feature freeze date - Final Release of TYPO3 4.6.0 on October 25th 2011
Next steps¶
If you feel interested in a particular project or task, please reply on the list or directly get in contact with Xavier Perseguers as Release Manager of TYPO3 4.6.
[1] http://forge.typo3.org/issues/25749
[2] http://wiki.typo3.org/Git_Gerrit
[3] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-form
[4] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-xliff