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Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] [WARNING] SimRel Headed Off the Tracks

Of course how often to release and in which form is also a digression...

I am kind of ambivalent on this topic.  I do believe that quality has suffered as a result of this new approach.  As Sebastian mentioned, as a consumer I now often have the choice between the old version with known bugs versus the new version with unknown bugs.  Neither is a great choice.  I don't think anyone is on safe ground arguing that quality has actually been improved by eliminating service releases.

But I wonder the general feeling others are expressing that to them it feels like the cost personally and for their projects is higher without maintenance release.  My sense is somewhat different. In the past I had to maintain two streams and hence two development environments with two different target platforms.  I'd fix problems in master and then I had to cherry pick them into the maintenance branch (with different version increments).  I also had to do builds for both streams.  This duality was more work than is currently the case maintaining only a single stream.

So I try to understand why there is the perception that maintaining one stream is more work than maintaining two streams.  I imagine part of the problem here the extent to which changes in upstream dependencies are disruptive to my project, which is more likely in a non-service stream.  I.e., did the Platform or EMF change something that makes Xtext no longer work such that Xtext is forced to spin a new release rather than feeding their existing release (or a maintenance release if they so choose) into the train for the next cycle?  The extent to which we all avoid truly disruptive changes, surely it ought to be be less work in general to release from a single stream...

Please correct any misperception I may have or illuminate any issues I do not fully understand in this regard.  I'd like to better understand the perception of others.  Please note that I agree that quality has suffered, but that's a separate issue from the perception that it's more work.

Regards,
Ed

On 29.01.2020 11:13, Alexander Fedorov wrote:
Hi all,

-1 for going back to annual releases.

For stable components there is an option to keep the same version contributed for a number of releases - this should be sufficient to support "annual release" experience.
For new and incubation components "annual" may mean mostly "next life".

For people that wants to contribute a patch it sounds like "ok, if you will be patient enough to go through all the environment setup, reviews and discussion - you have a chance to see you change next year" - for a majority of newcomers this doesn't look attractive.
For eclipse-based vendors - annual release is the invitation to do a fork and think about switching to another platform. Why? Because "another platform" with growing popularity has monthly releases.

Also annual releases will resurrect a number of "service releases" with all the effort required, at least to support the new Java versions. So, as Mickael stated below, the effort is comparable.

I agree with Mickael that only enforced automated reject via pipeline rules can improve the situation with release quality. Passing pipeline should mean "the change is good enough to spent time on final review before the merge".

Regards,
AF

29.01.2020 12:58, Mickael Istria пишет:


On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 10:46 AM Matthias Wienand <matthias.wienand@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,

+1 for going back to annual releases.

Projects are not forced to do quarterly releases. You can have your project do a yearly release, but it just means that since Platform releases every 3 months, you need to check your project against 2 milestones and 2 RCs of the Platform every 3 months (12 times a year). Which doesn't change much compared to previous state where projects were supposed to be tested against all Platform milestones and RC, ie 11 times a year.\

The work done by Ed M is very appreciated. Ideally, the different checks (e.g. licenses) could be automated to prevent degradation of SimRel quality.

Some checks have already been possible to automate for a while: https://wiki.eclipse.org/CBI/p2repoAnalyzers/Repo_Reports#With_Maven
The licence check may be missing, and could be added.
Or one can probably just build a similar Maven configuration to run the other analyzers.
But the real thing is that what matters is not building the report, but enforcing rules without human intervention. This typically happens only with mechanism that fail the build in case the analyzers see issue. As long as human reading is required, it cost too much effort and time to someone, and feedback loop becomes too long. The only good way to report a bad state is to fail the build so it doesn't pass review.

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