Release plans for Kallithea

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

Hi all,

Thanks a lot for your positive responses.
I will try to address some of your questions below...

Konstantin Veretennicov wrote:
>
> Any plans for "after 1.0"?

Definitely 1.0 is not the final release, rather a new beginning.
We should make more frequent releases even if the scope is more limited.
But there are no definite plans in terms of what these releases would be and
what they would contain.

As we have quite a large backlog of pull requests, I think that after bootstrap
has landed and 0.9/1.0 is out, we should try to work together as a community to
review, test, polish and integrate the remaining pull requests, before starting
with too much new changes.
Also, there is a backlog of issues, which is also something to triage and either
close or address.

Konstantin Veretennicov also wrote:
>
> Also, will there be any shift in dev policies when 1.0 is hit?
> Normally users expect higher stability and compatibility from 1.x
> releases, compared to 0.x. On the other hand, I see pressure on
> Kallithea maintainers to hasten integration of changes, shorten
> reviews, etc. Those can be a bit contradictory.

Until now, I think Kallithea has not 'broken' existing installations with
upgrades, right? I think we should continue doing that. There may be database
upgrades, but thanks to the Alembic work of Søren Løvborg, we can handle that
cleanly.

I do think we should avoid integrating big features (like pytest, TurboGears2,
bootstrap) over a long timespan, because it impedes the creation of a release.
But this is easier said than done: due to the volunteering nature of this
project, there is only so much time on a developer's hands. If we could bundle
forces and work together for such features, things would go faster.
Creating a branch for such big features is also a solution, but could be a
nightmare to merge/rebase at the end.


Long Vu wrote:
>
> The following PR
> https://bitbucket.org/conservancy/kallithea/pull-requests/343/repository-settings-phases-v5/diff
> and
> https://bitbucket.org/conservancy/kallithea/pull-requests/311/ssh-v8/diff
>
> will be before or after v1.0?  These 2 are pretty much the biggest wishes for us.

As we would like to make 1.0 soon, and there is still work for SSH, I think
chances are small that they will be included. But I fully agree that it's an
important feature, and I think it should be one of the things to tackle as a
community soon after 1.0.

For 'repository settings', I have not yet looked at it in detail, and I should.
I don't dare to make statements now about its readiness for 0.9/1.0.


David Bainbridge wrote:
>
[..]
> If you are not releasing regularly you tend to slip off the radar. Having the
> most recent release being over a year old would demonstrate that the project
> is dead in the opinion of some. The mailing list shows a different view, of
> course, as does Openhub.net https://www.openhub.net/p/kallithea
>
> Developing without releasing means that features are just not getting out
> there to organizations that may want to adopt Kallithea.
>
> As Thomas says, the release numbering also shows that Kallithea has not
> reached version 1 yet. If you are going to use an open source component as the
> primary way for managing repos containing your company's intellectual property
> then you are looking for something that has reached a level of maturity at
> which the community developing it is prepared to declare that the project is
> mature enough to at least start at 1.0!
>
> So, from my perspective this is a really good move and puts Kallithea on the
> map, instead of in the heap marked 'pending'.
>
> We aren't using Kallithea yet, but this is going in the right direction!

Thanks a lot David for writing this. It's very helpful to get such input from
users or potential users! I hope we can become a good alternative for you soon
:-)

Best regards,
Thomas