[joomla-wg-production] Mootools and the future

[Ian MacLennan]

Hey guys,

So, I was speaking today with Darren Waddell from Mootools.  I think we need to discuss some things in regards to this, and particularly w.r.t. Mootools 1.3.

So, as you are aware, we currently have Mootools 1.1 in J! 1.5 and we have Mootools 1.2 in trunk.  We have current plans to release one more version of J! 1.5 which would include an upgrade to Mootools 1.2 along with a backwards compatibility layer.  As far as I know, feedback from the upgrade plugin has been mostly positive.  There have been some small issues that are mostly related to an incomplete implementation of More in the upgrade plugin (which I need to fix).

Now, in the meantime, Mootools 1.3 just went beta.  The changes in this release are relatively minor, with the biggest enhancement from what I understand being the new selector engine which is supposed to be quite a bit better.  The Mootools guys are promising 100% compatibility with all of the documented/public methods/properties of Mootools 1.2.

Now, with Merge freeze on Wednesday, it will obviously not be possible to get Mootools 1.3 GA in before that (since it won't exist yet).  But I think we need to think really hard about including this upgrade in our 1.6 release so that we don't get behind again.  In talking to Darren, their beta has been really strong.  As a result, they hope to have a stable our relatively soon (I've copied Aaron and Darren here so they can comment as to exactly what the expectation can be with that).

So, I want to propose that instead of releasing 1.5.18 w/Mootools 1.2, we instead release 1.5.18 w/Mootools 1.3.  I want to set a target date for that release around the end June.  That leaves the Mootools guys about two months to go from Beta to Stable.  I plan to create a new Mootools branch based on current 1.5 release SVN which will contain everything as we plan to release it.  I'll put together a new upgrade plugin with the 1.3 beta in it and hopefully get everything synced up to 1.3.  I'm told we can still run the compatibility layer and have the same 1.1 compatibility that we would have otherwise had.

I'm not sure how we handle 1.6 w.r.t. the merge freeze.  Is it reasonable to put the Mootools 1.3 beta release into trunk and then ship with stable when it is ready?  Or should we leave it in a branch and preserve that as an exceptional situation where we merge a branch after merge freeze?  Or do we hold off on 1.3 and wait for 1.7?

Anyway, I wanted to raise this for discussion and propose that we find a way to get 1.3 into 1.6 before final release.

Ian

P.S. I have also emailed this to Aaron and Darren.  If you can please ensure that you reply all so that they get a copy of responses, that would be appreciated.  They don't have write access to this list, so if they can perhaps just reply to me and I'll forward that to the list as well, that would be appreciated.

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[Ian MacLennan]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Aaron Newton <anu...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, May 3, 2010 at 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: Mootools and the future
To: Ian MacLennan <ian.ma...@joomla.org>
Cc: darren....@gmail.com, joomla-wg-...@googlegroups.com, Valerio Proietti <valerio....@gmail.com>

I'm not too dialed in to the 1.3 dev team's status, so I'm CCing Valerio just so he can keep an eye on the thread.

The only thing here that I find potentially worrisome is the potential issues with jumping from 1.1 > 1.3. The compatibility script for 1.1 > 1.2 went through relatively rigorous testing when we released it (and we still missed a few things). We have not tested 1.3 + the 1.2 compatibility script against all the 1.1 specs (to my knowledge). So that's a to-do. It adds a layer in there though and it makes it more likely to cause issues.

The other thing is that the 1.2 upgrade helper logs instructions when you use deprecated methods. Those instructions tell you what to change to use 1.2 syntax. So we probably need to revisit that upgrade helper and have a 1.1 > 1.3 version that logs instructions for 1.3's API.

My main concern here is that this upgrade go smoothly. The upgrade from 1.2 > 1.3 should be super simple. You can use the built-in compat layer without changing anything and it should work (compared with the 1.1>1.2 layer, which can only offer about 95% coverage). I don't want users of J! who upgrade from 1.1 > 1.3 to have a bad experience and think we didn't learn our lesson the last time.

As always, we're here to help you guys (and gals).

Aaron

[Mark Dexter]

It sounds to me like we definitely want 1.2 for J! 1.5 and probably want to stay with 1.2 for J! 1.6. For 1.6, we could revisit when we are ready for RC1 perhaps. Does that make sense to others? Mark

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Ian MacLennan <ian.ma...@joomla.org> wrote:

[Andrew Eddie]

For Joomla 1.5 I would say we ship with MT1.1/1.2 and leave it there.

For Joomla 1.6 I would say push MT1.3 into the trunk now.

Regards,
Andrew Eddie
http://www.theartofjoomla.com - the art of becoming a Joomla developer

[JM Simonet]

+1 IF tests are done fast on MT1.3 in a branch for 1.6

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[Christophe Demko]

I agree with Andrew +1

[Louis Landry]

I'm with Andrew as well.  We can absolutely work with the MT guys to make sure any issues that arise with our behaviors get resolved during the beta phase.

- Louis

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[Mark Dexter]

Hi. That works for me. Mark