[Koha-devel] About Release process

[Paul Poulain]

Hello koha-devel,

I have some points to rise about our release process.
Koha 3.8 has been released 2.5 months ago, and some libraries have
reported major problems with 3.8.0. The main origin of those problems
came from the fact that a large feature (hourly loans) has been pushed
close to the release. It works well, but introduced many side effect:
changing the issuing date field to a datetime field broke many other
features because some comparison became wrong.

When Koha 3.4 has been released, we faced a similar problem, with the
switch to T::T that caused many problems too (badly scoped variables in
loops, translations problems)

Those problems are solved quickly, but libraries that installed Koha
3.X.0 in production faced troubles.
So I think we must refine our workflow.

There are 2 options here:
 * stop pushing enhancements that are potentially harmful sooner (2
months before the release ?). What could be harmful is the RM decision.
That would make 4 months for pushing ENH, and 2 months for testing.
 * Release the 3.X.0 saying it's a beta, could have some bugs not
detected. The 3.X.1 being a RC, and the 3.X.2 being the 1st really
stable version.

I must say that I prefer, the 2nd option: contributors are concentrated
on stabilizing 3.8, and, on the previous release, a lot of ENH have been
signed off close to the release. It look like we had 2 periods: the 1st
one where our strength are dedicated to stable, the 2nd one being
dedicated to the next release.

What is also good with the 2nd option is that it does not change a lot
the current timeline and workflow. It's just a matter of announcing things.

Your opinion ?

PS: I must also add that, independently from this community decision,
BibLibre plan to deploy most customers in 3.X.2, and I've been told by
Brendan that bywatersolutions will probably wait for .3 or .4. Both of
our companies having a few libraries accepting to heavily test releases
early.
-- 
Paul POULAIN
http://www.biblibre.com
Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08