Release cycle pipeline

[ficuscr]

On the April 2nd around 1:45 PM I had a number of pages that used
column charts on a site stop working. I figured we were having some
network issues at first since it seemed to be stalling on includes of
tooltip.css from Google's servers. Had to be that or something
changed/broke on Googles end.

After a couple hours I was able to diagnose it as being due to a
collision with Prototype. After more searching I found this:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-visualization-api/browse_thread/thread/92e7d760d6bec4a8

Is that really how I'll be finding out about new releases? No change
log? No heads up?

My question is how can I isolate myself from something like this
happening again?
Sadly having a cleaner slate, removing our archaic version of
Prototype and other stale JS is not a feasible option.

1) Could I save the JS off the CDN locally? Seems straightforward
enough to grab the JS, although I am not sure how the CSS requests
from that code are generated. Is it possible to use the library
locally?

2) Do I have to be pointing to latest release? Is there a way to
version my includes? Sadly seems like 1.0 is still 1.0 even after the
release yesterday that broke our pages. No minor minor?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. I have a love hate
relationship with gvis but would like to continue to use it. I just
need to ensure that it does not introduce instability into my
applications.

Thanks. -Tom Godar

[asgallant]

Join the "we want version control" club.  Updates are announced here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/googlegroups-announce 

In answer to your questions:

1) Nope.  The TOS specifically prohibit you from downloading or mirroring the API

2) Yup.  Your options are the current stable release or the next RC.  Version 1 is the current stable and 1.1 is the current RC, that's it.

[NA]

I have a slightly different question:

  Why hasn't the GVIZ team add versioning consistent with what's in other products? 

Please don't reply saying "we will consider it".  That's not what I'm asking for.  I am specifically asking why you haven't added it yet despite requests to do so for at least 2 yrs.  Not doing so contradicts what Google does with other services and possibly with Google's Deprecation Policy (which agrees to use commercially reasonable efforts to support deprecated versions). 

There must be a good reason for not implementing versioning.  Understanding that reason would really help your external users understand the product better. 

Can someone from Google give a thoughtful response to this?  I'd really appreciate it, as would many of us on the group here.

thanks,

[Andrea Dawkins]

I was really shocked about this discovery myself.  I spent hours this morning trying to find a list of version numbers to pass into the load method.  It really puts us as developers at the mercy of major bugs.  Right now no charts are working for Firefox.  I am scrambling to find a solution.  There should be a way when we release our software to say "this is version 1.1.0" and in our next release, we move up to the latest API version.  It puts the developers back in control.  

As much as I love Gviz, this is a serious issue.

[Jérôme]

While i understand the version control issue, all my charts work on firefox since 3 months, with the various releases.

Btw the new developper page for chart tools is quite not up to date about version history

[Yolanda Davis]

Andrea I'm right there with you. I asked about versioning when the previous release occurred and led to a bug in our production environment. My advice would be to follow this forum so that when the Vis team announces the release candidate (about a couple of weeks prior to the release) you can test your environment and report any issues before they cutover. Go here to see how to test with the candidate release https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/release_notes#ReleaseProcess

Hopefully that can help in the future until they have versioning in place.

Yolanda 

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