Road to CMSimple_XH 1.7

[cmb]

Hello Community,

even though XH 1.6.4 has been released only 5 weeks ago, the roadmap for XH 1.6.5 is already quite long. I suggest that we start voting on it in a few weeks, and that we concentrate on XH 1.7.0 after the release of XH 1.6.5, effectively putting XH 1.6 in bug-fix only mode. So if you have further improvements which should make it into XH 1.6, you better suggest them soon.

As there are some significant modifications on the roadmap for XH 1.7, I suggest that we do the voting in several steps: what already is on the roadmap after the release of XH 1.6.5 could be voted upon right away. New suggestions could still be added during or after the voting, for another voting round. I hope that we'll be able to release a first beta of XH 1.7 in spring 2015, and that we could set the EOL of XH 1.6 to the end of 2015 (but not later than the release of PHP 7).

Christoph

[cmb]

I suggest that we do the voting in several steps: what already is on the roadmap after the release of XH 1.6.5 could be voted upon right away.

After having a closer look at the roadmap, I'm afraid that is not feasible. Several of the items require thorough (re)consideration and discussion, so it seems to me that we should tackle the roadmap piecemeal. During the voting phase for each part, other suggestions could be elaborated, so we won't loose that much time. Nonetheless I'm quite sure that my estimation to release a first beta in spring was way too optimistic; most likely late summer/early fall are more realistic.

I suggest to concentrate on the PHP requirements and closely related issues at first, because that would influence much of the further development. Especially important would be to set forth an end-of-life date for the 1.6 branch, and to decide whether we will support PHP 7 with this branch.

More than a year ago I have suggested to drop PHP 4 support for the next version (1.7/2.0). In this discussion there has been some agreement to lift the requirements to PHP 5.2.0. However, when I consider that this XH version will probably be released at the end of 2015, we might even consider requiring PHP >= 5.3.0 (by that time even PHP 5.4 will have reached its EOL).

If we raise the PHP requirements, it seems reasonable to make use of new features and to remove obsolete fallbacks in existing code. This would require a code review, but IMO that's a reasonable investment, as it would result in safer (i.e. less error-prone) code.

Adding visibility specifiers, class abstraction, using class consts instead of vars where feasible, as well as switching to PHP 5 constructors seems to be a no-brainer. It seems that implementing Autoloading of classes as early as possible would also have benefits (<INS>early</INS> performance evaluation; getting rid of several include/require_once()s). If we would decide on requiring PHP 5.3, closures should be used (at least to replace create_function()), and namespaces might be introduced (note that we should keep BC by using class_alias() and "soft namespacing" [i.e. the _ convention] for non-class entities).

In particular I suggest voting on the following items:

• lift requirements to PHP >= 5.3.0 ("later" would mean PHP >= 5.2.0; "never" would mean a lower PHP version)
• define the end of life date of the 1.6 branch to be 2015-12-31 ("later" would mean a later date, maybe 2016-06-30)
• deny PHP 7 support for 1.6 branch
• introduce visibility specifiers, class abstraction, class consts, PHP 5 constructors (requires PHP 5)
• introduce class autoloading (requires PHP 5.1.2)
• introduce closures (requires 5.3)
• introduce namespaces (requires 5.3)

Furthermore I suggest to open the voting on these items on 2015-02-04 and close it on 2015-02-22. This leaves us still some time to discuss the issues, and our usual 18 days for voting.

Do you agree? Any details to discuss?

[svasti]

Well, a huge lot has accumulated on the 1.7 roadmap. And I guess every developer has different aspects he finds important. And many points are quite unclear.
I think it's save to have a minimum requirement of php 5.3.
Distribution according to php-magazine:
Nov 2014
PHP 5.3 — 14,85 %
PHP 5.4 — 28,61 %
PHP 5.5 — 48.87 %
PHP 5.6 — 7,67 %

life date of the 1.6 branch to be 2015-12-31

Wow, you are optimistic. I'd rather say, if 1.7.1 is out by that time, we could think about it.

[cmb]

And I guess every developer has different aspects he finds important.

Most certainly.

Distribution according to php-magazine:

While I do highly regard Jordi Boggiano for his work on Composer, this statistik is irrelevant wrt. our user-base:

Er analysierte daraufhin die Logfiles von packagist.org der letzten 50 Tage; denn mit jedem Composer-Update schickt der anfragende Server die PHP-Version im User-Agent-Header mit. So gesehen eine ziemlich einfache Methode, um an die verwendeten PHP-Versionen zu kommen.

I assume that there are few, if any, PHP scripts running on shared hosting which are updated from packagist.org directly.

W3Techs gives rather different statistics:

Version 5.3: 45.3%
Version 5.4: 27.2%
Version 5.2: 19.3%
Version 5.5: 6.5%
Version 5.1: 1.2%
Version 5.6: 0.5%

This matches much better my, admittetly limited, experience with CMSimple support. And even the latest WordPress does only require PHP 5.2.4 -- why would they stick with a nearly unused version?

That is not to argue for PHP 5.2. IMO we should dare to require 5.3, considering that 5.2 is declining since quite a while, and that we would have to support it for the life time of 1.7 (or 2.0.0 or whatever the next version will be).

Wow, you are optimistic. I'd rather say, if 1.7.1 is out by that time, we could think about it.

I'd rather give our users a long term schedule. Consider they would have to change to a new provider, albeit having a long term contract at their hands. And, IMO, we should release 1.7 at latest shortly after PHP 7.0.0 will be released -- I'd rather avoid having to make 1.6 compatible with it (even if that's presumably not too hard, as it stands currently).

[cmb]

I have now opened the voting for the first sprint of 1.7. Please vote only for "ideas" that are dated for 2015-02-23 (there are six of them).

I have not put the PHP 5.3 features (closures and namespaces) in this sprint, because I think they'll require more detailed consideration, and it's not clear if we'll lift the minimum requirements to this version anyway. However, I have added the item "Always leave the HEADs in a working state" to the first sprint.

Voting ends on 2015-02-23: http://www.cmsimple-xh.org/roadmap/?XH-1.7.

[cmb]

A reminder, as nobody except me has voted so far:

I have now opened the voting for the first sprint of 1.7. Please vote only for "ideas" that are dated for 2015-02-23 (there are six of them).

[cmb]

Reminder: voting on the first "sprint" ends on Monday!

[lck]

Ich würde ja gerne voten, aber ich glaube, dafür sollte man sich in der Sache schon sehr gut auskennen.
Abgesehen davon, wo und wie? Einfach bei den Themen mit "+1" oder "-1" ?

Zweitens, sind die Themen meistens in Englisch. Ich habe aber im Gefühl, das dieses Forum mehr deutsch- als englisch- oder anderssprachige Nutzer und aktive Mitglieder hat.
Daher wäre es evtl. sinnvoll, die Themen auch in Deutsch darzustellen

[cmb]

Ich würde ja gerne voten, aber ich glaube, dafür sollte man sich in der Sache schon sehr gut auskennen.

Ich denke, man sollte wissen, worum es beim jeweiligen Punkt geht, und den Vorschlag und die eventuelle Diskussion auch einigermaßen nachvollziehen können

Abgesehen davon, wo und wie? Einfach bei den Themen mit "+1" oder "-1" ?

Das steht auf jeden Fall jedem frei (gerne auch mit einer kurzen oder nicht so kurzen Begründung). Das hat dann aber nur indirekte Auswirkung auf die Abstimmung, weil sich die Stimmberechtigten dadurch vielleicht beeinflussen lassen.

Ansonsten steht es jedem frei sich um Stimmrecht zu bewerben -- ganz informell; einfache eine kurze Nachricht genügt. Das ist nur eine Maßnahme, um zu verhindern, dass vielleicht Spammer, Trolle oder Leute, die CMSimple(_XH) gar nicht kennen, die Abstimmung beeinflussen. Ich sehe Deinen Post als eine solche Bewerbung, und da Du Dich ja gut mit CMSimple_XH auskennst, hab ich Dir ein Konto für die Roadmap eingerichtet. Einfach unten rechts auf der Seite einloggen. Die Zugangsdaten schick ich Dir gleich per PM.

Zweitens, sind die Themen meistens in Englisch. Ich habe aber im Gefühl, das dieses Forum mehr deutsch- als englisch- oder anderssprachige Nutzer und aktive Mitglieder hat.
Daher wäre es evtl. sinnvoll, die Themen auch in Deutsch darzustellen

Ja, da ist schon was dran. Das Forum ist schon weitgehend deutschsprachig dominiert, und auch die Downloads auf SF sind zu knapp 50 % aus deutschsprachigen Ländern. Vielleicht sollten dann zumindest die konkreten Vorschläge zur Abstimmung auch auf Deutsch übersetzt werden (am einfachsten vielleicht gleich im jeweiligen Thread im OD-Forum). Was halten andere davon?