[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Like sugarplums, but they can't dance as well

[Mike Rylander]

On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 3:46 PM, Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net> wrote:
> Hi Robert:
>
> On 3 January 2011 14:53, Soulliere, Robert
> <robert.soulliere at mohawkcollege.ca> wrote:

[snip]

>
> So... given #1 through #4, why does the 1.6.2.0 release exist at all?
> The answer is that Equinox had a contractual obligation to create a
> 1.6.2.0 release; however, contracts with individual Evergreen
> communities can't determine what the Evergreen community as a whole
> supports or recommends for use in production.
>

Well, that's not quite the whole story.  There was a discussion (a
conference call that you were on, IIRC) last spring with most of the
committer team, before we started the regular IRC dev meetings, where
we discussed 1.6.2 and the strong desire by some users (active at the
time and soon-to-be) to get chunks of then-trunk functionality into a
release before or concurrently with 2.0.  It wasn't simply "ESI had to
do it."  ESI did, however, agree to work on some features for backport
to a 1.6.2 release after this discussion.  We did so in the open, and
saw collaboration from the community (including some of those
soon-to-be users) in improving some of that backported material.

That being said, I agree with your assertion below that 1.6.2 needn't
be advertised.  Timing and tuits have collaborated to make 1.6.2 less
useful in the long term that it could be and our limited
community-based support resources (IMO) will serve us better focusing
on 2.0; but, 1.6.2 is still useful to those that need the features
(including some that are not in 2.0) on which development was started
before 2.0 was branched but finished quite a bit later, during the
beta period and after backporting to 2.0 was "allowed".  The work on
that was done in good faith and ESI will support 1.6.2, but we also
don't encourage anyone that does /not/ need the backported features to
adopt 1.6.2 -- with 2.0 in RC, it's a better choice for all but a few
institutions.

> Ergo - I'm not sure we even want to advertise the 1.6.2.0 release, in
> any way. I'm sorry if this means that you've wasted your time; but if
> this comes as a surprise to anyone else (I'm sure it does to you),
> note that almost all of this has been discussed during the Evergreen
> developer team meetings (see
> http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=dev:meetings:2010-12-07
> and the raw IRC logs for the meeting at
> http://evergreen-ils.org/irc_logs/evergreen/2010-12/%23evergreen.07-Tue-2010.log
> as a reasonable starting point for the official discussion about the
> status of 1.6.2.0).
>


-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com