Horde4 News: Horde release cycle

[Gunnar Wrobel]

  Horde 1.0.0: 1999
  Horde 2.0:   2002
  Horde 3.0:   2004

.. and finally Horde4 in 2011.

The gap between 3.0 and 4.0 has been too large. The Horde team tries  
to keep backward compatibility within a major version. Probably nobody  
tried running a recent Kronolith from 2010 on Horde 3.0 from 2004.  
There'd probably be some issues and limitations but they should be  
minor.

While this kind of long term support may be useful for some edge cases  
it can also impede development progress. A good example are the Kolab  
drivers in the currently released version: Kolab support within Horde  
started to improve in 2006. At that time Horde3 was already the active  
branch and there was some very basic Kolab functionality in there. So  
the new code had to keep those interfaces stable. Which basically  
meant twisting and bending it into code that would do just that but  
otherwise be really problematic. That code is still a reality in the  
current stable release from Horde3.

This and similar problems did not pass unnoticed though and changes to  
the release cycle have been discussed internally for a while already.  
With the release of Horde4 approaching it now makes sense to discuss  
such changes with the Horde community. The envisioned target is a time  
based release cycle.

The discussion started today on the Horde development mailing list  
[1]. Feel free to listen in or to add your own comments if you want to  
influence the direction of our future release mode.

[1] http://lists.horde.org/archives/dev/Week-of-Mon-20110124/025700.html

Blog entry: http://log.pardus.de/2011/01/horde-release-cycle.html

-- 
Core Developer
The Horde Project

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