General discussion of development ideas and the approaches taken in the 3.x branch of phpBB. The current feature release of phpBB 3 is 3.3/Proteus.
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When releases are deployed, the software automatically updates to the latest release in the background, without interrupting application use. Note: I know this may be a difficulty for phpBB since admin may need to initiate the upgrade instead of doing it automatically.
-1 to auto-updates. That would confuse admins and possibly break things (even with safeguards in place).
How would it confuse admins? How would it break any more things than manual updates?
It wouldn't break any differently except that it would break the board while you're not even around and, in some cases, it could be for days or even longer. Auto-update is a -1 from me as well.
P.S. I find the Google Chrome update/release cycle pretty annoying, same as with FireFox's.
A completely automated update system is probably not a good idea unless we can be > 99.999% certain no board will have issues.
What could be done is have the board automatically search for updates and notify via email or otherwise the board administrator that an update is available and give a link to the ACP where the administrator could run a tool to automatically download the update package and then start running it.
If this works really well, perhaps in the future the option for fully automated updating can be added.
I still think that we can think of a release cycle based on the features made and not surely based on time.
I've noticed in the past year I've been active here and from the history of PR's that features seem to almost be developed in waves. There are times when no features are released (happens quite some time), times where features are released but only about 2 or 3 in a "reasonable" time frame (happens, but not much) and times when a "nice" number of features are released at once (also happens with some frequency). One of the main reasons here may be related to releasing new features and then fixing the bugs related to that released feature (but that's just me speculating).
So we could run such that we have a minimum time required to pass before a x.y version is released (say... 6 months! or... 1 year!) and then we can plan to release the new sub-version such that it happens after one of those "waves"
Note that I'm not talking about bug fixes. Only feature releases.
Oh...
Tham!
I thought that, as long as we told exactly what is being changed on a high lever, that extension makers would know which changes would they need to do to maintain their extensions/MODs working properly.
We would like it to be that easy. The problem is that the Extension/MOD author would need to actually keep up with those changes which, in my experience, they don't actually check until someone reports that it broke. By then the board admins are ticked off and possibly don't have a working board. Fortunately it's much easier to fix with an extension where they would just have to delete it, provided they have FTP access. Finding out which of those extensions is the troublemaker is another story however.
Extensions generally should not have issues from updates. About the only major reason for issues would be events changing somehow, but this is very unlikely to happen.
