[Seaside-dev] Configurations, changes and releases

[Johan Brichau]

Hi everyone,

Over the past month, when working towards 3.1.2, several people have contributed changes to keep Seaside working for Magritte, Pier, Pharo 4, Squeak, Gemstone 3.x, etc..
All of that lead to the creation of several versions of Seaside in the ConfigurationOfSeaside3, making several changes over baselines and versions.

As I noticed changes to existing baselines and versions, I found it very difficult to see what exactly was happening.
I think it's great to have new versions fast, but we should make sure everyone is on the same track.
In the past, mistakes have been made where modifications to already published versions caused havoc downstream.

Diego and Stephan reached out last week to discuss a policy and we agreed to have a discussion on the mailinglist.

First off, the Seaside team had already set up some development practices [3] and a release process [1][2].
I think these are still applicable but we might fine-tune them some more. Here are my proposed additions:

- no changes to baselines that have a dependent released version (we really need to consider those sealed)
- send a quick note to the mailinglist when you are changing the configuration or when you release a version (this avoids surprises with other team members)

I will also shamelessly plug here that we would be better of working with the github repository, using pull requests [4]. Right now, we are using github as the reference repository for Seaside and Grease in Gemstone and it's the only place I notice if something breaks in Squeak (the master branch is running travis tests for Pharo and Squeak).

Johan

[1] https://code.google.com/p/seaside/wiki/MakeRelease
[2] #DevelopmentProcess in ConfigurationOfSeaside3
[3] https://code.google.com/p/seaside/wiki/CodingConventions
[4] https://github.com/glassdb/Seaside31