Re: Plone 3.5

Hanno Schlichting schrieb:
> While everyone is waiting for Plone 4 and its rather long timeline, some
> people have been thinking about how to bridge the gap between the
> current stable 3.x releases and the future.
> 
> The general idea that seems to have met some consensus is to go for a
> Plone 3.5 release up next. We'd skip any 3.4 release and go for a 3.5
> that is similar in spirit to the Plone 2.5 release. It tries to both
> refresh some of our technical underpinnings in addition to some more
> intrusive feature changes we didn't allow ourselves in the 3.x series so
> far.

[...]

> This is only a proposal that needs community feedback and encouragement
> at this point to make it into an official roadmap. The next steps are to
> have an open discussion about this for the next one to two weeks. If it
> meets general favor, we will appoint the new/old framework team and let
> them recommend a release manager to the Foundation board for official
> nomination.

Improving Plone and cleaning up things is always a good thing. But a 3.5 
major release will break the users expectations to have a stable 
backward compatible 3.x release cycle. It's also confusing to name a 
major version x.5 with all the consequences like incompatible 3.x 
Add-Ons. The naming of Plone 2.5 was a rather unfortunate thing. The 
proper naming for a backward incompatible release should be 4.0. I think 
nobody wants a short living 4.0 release and rename the current Plone 4 
to Plone 5.

I'm in favour to put as much changes into a 3.4 that are backward 
compatible. I think it's ok to change some defaults for new Sites that 
can be easily changed by an administrator like TinyMCE/optional 
packages/Additional Roles that can. Thus I don't now what consequences 
this would have for our documentation team.
Changes that bring other than really minor incompatibilities for 3.x 
add-ons are a no-go for a 3.x release imho.


..Carsten