RTC issues being held back until 3.5.1?

[brian teeman]

I dont understand why we have loads of RTC issues (currently 28 https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pulls?page=1&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+label%3ARTC_)  that are being held back until after the release of 3.5.0

It makes no sense to me that we have a fully tested issue for a bug and it isnt being merged. Surely the whole point of a beta release is to identify bugs and make sure they are fixed before the final release. How can it be sensible to acknowledge the existence of a bug and have a fully tested working solution for the bug but not include it in the next release.

"Sorry you cant use that feature, we know its a bug and we have had a fix for that bug for over 2 months but we thought it was better to wait until the next release in another 2 months. I know its frustrating for you but thats the way we work" - No one ever wanted to say

[Walt Sorensen]

Some say "that's just the way Semantic Versioning works" or "sticking to the Semantic Versioning format is better than the way things use to work" or "we are already in beta stage, minor bug fixes only". I've even heard of some PR's for "bugs" which are "being held back for 4.0" (also note the 3.6.0 tags in the current RTC list)

Personally, I think some of this comes more down to the interpretation of what "beta" means, going by the definition of "feature complete" then any bug that is fixed without introducing new features or introducing B/C issues should be included in 3.5.0. 

I think we should be a little more flexible during the Beta stage to ensure bugs are fixed (otherwise we should just skip 3.5.0 and go straight to 3.5.1). 

[Michael Babker]

Bug fixes generally can and should continue to be merged during beta; part of the reason for declaring beta (with the project's current definitions) is declaring a feature freeze and testing for stability of the upcoming release.  Once you reach a release candidate, something I tried to do in the past (and generally failed to make work effectively, and something that's generally abandoned now), you should be limiting your merges to major fixes only.  A well tagged release candidate should have no changes except the version string and maybe any security fixes.

Of course, since everyone has a different interpretation of the release workflow, it's basically the call of whoever is making the release decisions at the time.  How Mark handled things is probably different than how I handled things which is probably different to how George handled things which is probably different to whomever is calling the shots now.

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[brian teeman]

To be absolutely clear I am not talking about any PR which is a new feature. I am only talking about big fixes that were discovered during beta testing.

[ssnobben]

"Sorry you cant use that feature, we know its a bug and we have had a fix for that bug for over 2 months but we thought it was better to wait until the next release in another 2 months. I know its frustrating for you but thats the way we work" - No one ever wanted to say

So is it not possible to skip what holding Joomla back i f its not a major bug that is a showstopper or all focus on fixing that important issue wouldn't that be a priority? 

So could we not focus our dev time instead of a time model of 80/20% of getting Joomla 3.5 out of the door asap so we like Wordpress and Drupal have a CMS that have php7 support?

Now its like all people and our dev strategy is to focus on a 20/80% with more focus on the next release after Joomla 3.5 (Joomla 3.5,0 / Joomla 3.5.1) with improvements instead of solve the last annoying fixes to release J 3.5.0 asap before any approx time  line planning release of J 3.5.0t.

[Bakual]

Bugfixes can go in during beta as long as they don't change language strings in installation, because the installation folder is already under language freeze. But that rule has already been broken for 3.5.0 due to the long length of the beta period (and somebody forgot the language freeze).

Best bet is to ask the one who assigned a 3.5.1 milestone to know his reason for it.

[brian teeman]

Surely better for maintainers to simply review all the RTC that have been set to 3.5.1 milestone

https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+milestone%3A%22Joomla+3.5.1%22+label%3ARTC+sort%3Acreated-asc

A quick scan suggests the majority are bug fixes

[George Wilson]

I merged most stuff on the weekend. We had some constructive constructions with a MySQLi expert on the UTF8MB4 issues that have been holding back development. I have a further meeting scheduled for Tuesday evening when hopefully a decision will be made. I'm still optimistic about continuing with our timeline that we have laid out here https://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5640-timeline-update-for-3-5.html . So we will be becoming increasingly strict on what is and isn't a "bug" fix as we look to become increasingly stable over the next few weeks.

Kind Regards,

George

[brian teeman]

Thank you for the time you spent merging all those bug fixes

[George Wilson]

Dear All,

Just as a brief follow up. As per the announcement we did before Christmas at https://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5640-timeline-update-for-3-5.html with beta 2 due tomorrow we are going to be tightening up again on the Pull Requests that are RTC as we look to have a stable release. I've been fairly lax due to the huge amount of time between beta 1 and beta 2 on the things that I've been merging (some of them have arguably been minor features).

Thanks for your understanding

Kind Regards,

George