Hi Esteban,
you know I'm neither shy on contributing nor doing any work for Pharo but personally I think we open Pharo 8 too early and should better focus our efforts more
on finalizing P7 (see below) instead of opening the next construction site.
Things were already shaky and sometimes painful with P7 - nonetheless I managed to get 762 commits into it. Often simple or boring PR's just to get packages, classes, methods
in shape and clean up. Funny enough I can now say I'm on top of
https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/graphs/contributors ;)
I had a hard time finding out how things work in the new git/pharo/externally managed projects combination - sometimes also with broken or unfinished tools. A newly opened
P8 so early adds even more on top...
Several things directly came into my mind:
1.
http://bugs.pharo.org now points to nirvana now
This is like that since a lot (not to say it shouldn���t be fixed, but to explain that is no blocker).
That address needs to be redirected or decommissioned.
Same.
I think this is due some migration in INRIA servers,
In any case, this is orthogonal.
We should redirect pharo issues to them.
Is a problem in our CI, not in the image it self.
I���m not happy with it, but again this is orthogonal.
This needs to be solved, yes.
There was not reaction because mostly I was not around ;)
Yes, we know :)
Nonetheless we already switch to P8?
We didn���t switch to P8. We open P8 dev branch.
Build numbers are created /per branch/, not by job. This is a problem indeed but we do not have a solution for it.
Real solution will be to change launcher to not consider build number (but take build date, we don���t know)
Nonetheless we already switch to P8?
Again, we didn���t switch, we just opened.
8. Lately we switched the branches from "development" to "Pharo7.0" and now also "Pharo8.0". This was also just announced - without any discussion
in advance forcing people to resetup their tools and local repos.
This change is still not event reflected in the contribution guideline ... but we already switch to Pharo 8
The full purpose of the change was to be able to have two (or more) branches opened simultaneously.
And yes, there will be a Pharo8.0 (and eventually a Pharo9.0), etc. branches���
I know.
I���m almost the only one working on them.
10. There was nothing said about backporting strategy between the new P8 and P7 now���
It was said.
Backport will happen by doing pull requests to the different, active, branch.
Frontport (from P7 to P8) will be made in the same way, in regular basis.
To me it would already help a little bit to clarify the above raised points and get a more detailed info about the next P7 steps towards the release.
We still not release P7!.
To do that, we need several things to align before:
- 64bit windows vm
- new freetype2 version (2.9.1) in all platforms.
- Calypso glitches
- Some other cleanings (I do not remember exactly right now, I���m on holidays until 7/01 :P)
Independent from that I fear we constantly decouple more and more people with too many process and contribution scheme changes at once. From the discussions
on Discord I already see many people struggle - and often not only the beginners.
People struggle always.
We try to help, and to simplify.
Some times with better results than others.
But there is no such thing as an ���effortless contribution���, it was not like that before and it is not like that now.
But I will write another mail about this later.
Cheers!
Esteban