[Libreoffice] [board-discuss] Re: [Libreoffice-qa] End of the line for 3.3 family and regressions

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Pedro,

On Sat, 2011-12-10 at 11:46 +0000, Pedro Lino wrote:
> This isn't simply a matter of checking and reporting bugs. It involves
> the Quality of a product this Community claims to be Enterprise ready.
> IMO there can be NO regressions.

	Having no regressions is really a feature. That makes it rather
incompatible with a time-based release schedule. It is also a highly
expensive feature, and it is unclear who is going to do the work fixing
every regression in 3.4.x, particularly as the majority of dev. work has
switched focus to improving 3.5.x, and particularly since many bugs can
be classed as regressions if we try hard :-)

	I agree with you that the claim of "Enterprise ready" is perhaps
somewhat misleading and IMHO rather unhelpful. LibreOffice is not
Enterprise ready without enterprise support (which is capable of fixing
any regressions or issues a customer may experience). No matter how good
the job we do, customers will always find more bugs they need fixing,
regression or not.

> The TDF BoD and the Devs need to make a decision about how to handle this.

	I would recommend sticking to our time-based release schedule - there
are rather a number of nice bug fixes in 3.4.5 as it is, I've been
watching a few longer standing issues get nailed there.

	Having said all that, I don't see that 3.4.5 has to be the last release
in that series. I anticipate that people will still continue to merge
critical and/or obviously correct fixes and/or security fixes to the
libreoffice-3-4 branch, and we may have a 3.4.6 at some stage. We had a
particularly long 3.5 development cycle, so ...

	Of course, if some enterprise wants to support 3.4.x and continue
porting fixes to it & releasing they are of course most welcome to do
that indefinitely.

	What we need to do about the 3.3.x bugs, I don't know. If we have no
resources to re-test them vs. 3.4 - I would suggest we wait until we
have a good 3.5 beta to point at, and close them all with a comment
asking users to reproduce them in 3.5 and re-open/re-target them at that
version. But perhaps that is too harsh ? :-) either way, leaving bugs
malingering vs. 3.3.x while knowing full well that they'll be hidden vs.
that version is not so useful I think.

	At least, that's my take :-)

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot