Protocol of Team Meeting in March 2012

By: Oliver Hader

The TYPO3 v4 Core Development Team had an online meeting on March 15th 2012 with "TYPO3 6.0" as the major topic to be discussed.

Protocol of online meeting of TYPO3 Core Development Team

March 15th 2012, 5:00pm-7:00pm CET

Attendees

Steffen Ritter, Michael Stucki, Oliver Hader, Christian Jul Jensen, Benjamin Mack, Susanne Moog, François Suter, Tolleiv Nietsch, Ben van 't Ende, Jochen Rau, Georg Ringer (joined later), Ingo Renner (joined later)

The protocol is recorded by Oliver Hader.

Topics

1. TYPO3 6.0 and Releases
2. TYPO3 6.0 Requirements and Features
3. LTS Strategy
4. Current Projects and Tasks
5. Other topics / questions

1. TYPO3 6.0 and Releases

During the TYPO3 Snowboard Tour several suggestions concerning TYPO3 6.0 have been published to the official news channels of TYPO3. The version 6.0 has its origin in the current TYPO3 4.x development branch and aims to remove the limiting ceiling in terms of new major features, major clean-ups and refactorings and other "pentaphobic issues".

During this meeting many of the participants shared their feeling and motivation concerning a TYPO3 6.0 release, here are the most common ones:

• 6.0 is not just a "because-we-can" release, it really has to make sense in terms of releasing a new and real major version branch.
• TYPO3 needs to be reliable and stable, especially for those that are using the CMS for years now and want to continue with that - vague announcements like "Phoenix will be successor of v4" create more or less confusion. Thus, we need to gain back the trust in continuity of the known TYPO3 CMS.
• The general strategy for all TYPO3 products (TYPO3 v4/6.0, TYPO3 "Phoenix", FLOW3, ...) qualifies to be discussed in the new Product Board - however, this body (as a successor for the Steering Committee) still needs to be officially installed.
• The TYPO3 v4/6.0 Core Development Team agrees that there will be a TYPO3 6.0 release in the future, which has it's origin in the current v4 branch.
  

In general we agreed during this meeting (as well as in Laax and with internal team communication), that the next release after TYPO3 4.7 shall be TYPO3 6.0, not TYPO3 4.8. Following the 6-months release cycle, TYPO3 6.0 shall be released at the end of October 2012.

2. TYPO3 6.0 Requirements and Features

We discussed that topic only very briefly in the meeting since time was limited to do a collaborative brain-storming and complete feature list in an online meeting. There already was a list of ideas that was discussed during the TYPO3 Snowboard Tour 2012 in Laax. This list will be discussed again in more detail in the Core Team Meeting prior to the TYPO3 Developer Days 2012 in April.

Even if features are rather technical, the communicated impact by creating use-cases and examples are more valuable than just the technical part, e.g. the file abstraction layer allows to plug-in external storages like Amazon S3 or WebDAV which leads us to "TYPO3 6.0 - Cloud Edition" - but this is just one single example out of many others.

3. LTS Strategy

The main reason for TYPO3 4.5 being a LTS was to still be compatible with PHP 5.2 and IE6 in the backend. Meanwhile support for PHP 5.2 has been discontinued by PHP and also by most distributors.
Besides that our 6-monthly release cycle forced agencies to upgrade to the next version very often and also was an argument to have an LTS release. However, the period of 3 years seems too long in general - however, TYPO3 4.5 LTS will be supported until 2014 (sure!), but the next LTS version might only be supported for e.g. 18-24 months.

We discussed several scenarios for the release date of the next LTS release. TYPO3 4.5 LTS is supported until April 2014 with all bug-fixes and until October 2014 with security related fixes. To keep the period of overlapping LTS versions small, the next LTS release (e.g. TYPO3 6.2 LTS - no guarantee on the exact version number) might be in October 2013 or April 2014.

The whole topic shall be discussed by the community - during T3DD12 there shall be a decision.

4. Current Projects and Tasks

4.1. File Abstraction Layer (FAL)

Unfortunately there's no workshop for FAL on the T3DD12's schedule. Since most of the current FAL developers are there, they aim to at least have a public session on this feature.

The next steps are to merge the accordant FAL branch in the Incubator Git Repository with the recent changes in the official Core Repository and to resolve pressing API issues with the current FAL team.
Once this is done, the idea of FAL needs to be spread with new tutorials, documentation, workshops, etc. to enable other to understand and continue with the File Abstraction Layer.

5. Other topics / questions

5.1 Code Sprints

For spreading the idea and knowledge of a particular feature (like e.g. FAL), a general way for code sprints was briefly discussed.
There shall be regular code sprints for a particular topic (FAL, Workspaces, Extbase, ...), every active community member/developer can join and hotel and travel costs need to be reimbursed from the yearly team budget (= by the TYPO3 Association).

We agreed that there is the requirement of having general principles (e.g. in terms of a checklist) to kick-start and realize such code sprints, like e.g.

• define scope and goals for a code sprint with accordant mentors
• discuss with budget responsible, announce event and invite participants
• project management during code sprint (kanban, scrum - whatever, understandable tasks are required)
• measurement of quality and success of a code sprint
• final reports & after-match (clean-up, reimbursements, etc.)

5.2 TYPO3 6.0 Release Manager Election

We agreed on having the TYPO3 6.0 Release Manager Election as soon as possible. Since the process happens inside the TYPO3 v4/6.0 Core Development Team, only the results will be published to the community.
The nomination of candidates is from March 24th to 31st 2012. The election, which will happen online again, will be from March 31st to April 7th 2012. Thus, the TYPO3 6.0 Release Manager is installed just in time for the TYPO3 Developer Days 2012.

The election is just on a single person - the approved release manager can then decide on several supporting co-managers individually.