Elgg Releasing Too Fast

I feel like Elgg community has started to release elgg versions too fast where some of the plugins are just still sitting in elgg 1.9 version while many are still in 1.8. I feel like you guys give some time for the plugin developers to bring these plugins to the released update version. it's like 3 months back i came to elgg 1.9 & now it's in ellg 1.11 . Well i really appreciate the elgg team hard work & improvements they are doing but they need to also find the balance side of the community plugin development which has started to stagnant.

Does any of you feel's like me ? 

  • Evan was asking for examples, I gave one. Will report to github.

  • @juho - I think the point Ismayil is making is that upgrades can and do break other things. It's the nature of software. The end result, though, is that time we would have spent making things better is instead spent making sure that what we already have continues to function.

    Complexity theorists talk of two regimes - the Red Queen (always running to stay in the same place because things change too fast) and the Stalinist (too orderly and never adapting) - neither of which is desirable in an evolving system. What we seek, for a system that can evolve, is the edge of chaos which, in broad terms, is just on the ordered side of chaos. I think that's what we are trying to discover in this conversation.

    I doubt whether there is a single time value that would work for all, but I think it's useful to get a sense of what kind of development cycles are normal. On my main formal site we use rigid processes and large teams, we are under-resourced, and users will not tolerate large rapid change, downtime or broken parts, so even minor updates can take weeks or months. I run several other Elgg sites that follow quite different development patterns, where big changes are not a problem, the odd quirk is just fine, the odd few minutes or even hours of downtime is acceptable, and where I manage the whole process. For those, updates may take minutes. 

  • Yes, I wasn't complaining about the release cycle. I was just giving an example of how a bug fix in core results in a broken plugin. Not a big deal, it took me 2 seconds to fix, but then I need to clone and push and release.

    I am all up for using the latest release, and do my best to require the latest release in my plugins. It's just I can't be 100% sure that it will work as is with every minor release. Especially with UI not being under semver, I basically need to click on every single link generated by the plugin to be sure.

  • @Evan: what would it help to not make an annoucenment on new releases? Would people not still download it? Maybe less people but still. And any compatibility issues with 3rd party plugins would still have to get fixed (or at least tested to see if there are any). And the release notes are not only a nice service for end-users (who might not even read them in detail) but also a quick reference for plugin developers to check what areas might be worth to take a look specifically.

    Problem with new releases are not the deprecation issues listed in the deprecation file. As already said, these issues won't result in a plugin to stop working immediately. But there are not all deprecation warnings included in the deprecation file anyway (and the other issues won't get listed by the Code Analyzer plugin either). The more severe issues are changes in core that may result in a plugin to stop immediately because the change was not seen as BC-breaking or because there was simply a bug introduced while making the change in core. Such bugs might not even show up when using on bundled plugins but only on some very few 3rd party plugins. I really have difficulties to accept these general statements like "there are no compatibility issues with plugins to be expected and you can upgrade (blindly)". This was said about Elgg 1.9 and it was not true and it wasn't fully correct with Elgg 1.10 either (though it was almost true - and I'm not referring to deprecation issues here). Looking at the changelog of Elgg 1.11 I don't expect any problems with plugins that worked fine already on Elgg 1.10. But you can't say for sure without testing...

    For Elgg 2.0 I hope that at least the open issue of (optionally) suppressing the deprecation warnings shown to admins will get fixed. As said, these are not necessarily to be taken seriously immediately. But such warnings could show up on such a high frequency that it makes administration of a site merely impossible - and then the corresponding plugins can't get used properly even if they would work perfectly fine in theory. Maybe it's not even a problem on a production site when keeping the debug output off anyway. But it surely is a problem on test installations for plugin development if you need to use such a plugin simply to test the compatibility of your own plugin you actually work on with it. Therefore, I would see this issue as blocker for 2.0 even because if it won't get fixed before the current problem within Elgg 1.X of keeping plugins up-to-date with the latest release will just continue in the same way on Elgg 2.X.

    @Juho: good point about new releases (e.g. 2.1) introducing new features that could result in a 3rd party plugin require a specific 2.X version at minimum. Maybe the compatibility informations could still get slightly altered starting with 2.0 like for example showing "2.0 or later Elgg 2.X", "2.1 or later Elgg 2.X" etc. This would help to avoid updating the compatibility information for already existing plugin releases if no new release is necessary. Of course, the "no new release necessary" is kind of risky to be sure of as user of a plugin because the plugin developer might just not have updated the plugin yet even if it would be required. On the other hand, with Elgg core supposed not to break anything within a major branch lifetime a new plugin release might not be the course of action but fixing the regression in core instead (that could be done without the plugin developer getting active on his own if a user of the plugin reports the "core" issue).

    @Jon Dron: nice to hear the Elgg Update Services plugin gets used. Though there might be an issue with the plugin not reporting new releases when available for Elgg 1.9 or later. Unfotunately, I had no time to investigate this in detail yet but I came across it with at least two plugins which displayed the availability of new versions on Elgg 1.8 perfectly fine but not anymore on Elgg 1.9. It could be a bug in the Elgg Update Services plugin itself or maybe due to changes I made myself in the manifest files of the new releases of these plugins. But it could also be caused by recent changes in the community_plugins plugin or the community_webservices plugin (server-side counterpart of the Elgg Update Services plugin) not working correctly anymore on Elgg 1.9+ or with the latest version of the community_plugins plugin.

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