What happened to 3.3 SP1

[swhitman]

I have been monitoring the Roadmap found by going to issue tracking and selecting Roadmap on the left. I have been waiting for the release of 3.3 SP1 which was scheduled for June 25th 2010. On Friday, the 25th, 3.3 SP1 disappeared from the Roadmap. When I go to community download, there is still 3.3g listed. What happened to SP1? What is the difference between the 3.3g scheme for numbering and the 3.3 SP1 scheme?

[janv]

Enterprise 3.3 SP1 is available for download (since 25th June). In general, Service Packs (SPs) are only available for Enterprise customers.

For more details, please refer to:
http://www.alfresco.com/services/subscription/maintenance/
http://www.alfresco.com/products/networks/compare/

Regards,
Jan

[swhitman]

I inquired about a license that fit a small company like mine and was told that Alfresco is targeted for the large enterprise and that the Community Edition is made available for the purposes I was looking for.

So how does updating of the community version work? I have on good faith contributed to the open source community by diagnosing and reporting the large UIDVALIDITY IMAP problem to both zimbra an alfresco. The zimbra web client now accepts a larger UIDVALIDITY and I tried the new zimbra release and the 3.3g alfresco release and I get a different error. I find my original UIDVALIDITY post in the alfresco tracking system and not only is it fixed, but other related problems, including the new one I ran across, have also been fixed.

I have worked with a lot of open source products, but this is the first one I have seen that actually took an issue from the open source community, and NOT provided the resolution back to the community. I really don't understand why enterprise customers are benefiting from my efforts, when I am not allowed to.

[lfridael]

The way I understand it is that enhancements/fixes in the enterprise release do make it into the next community release. (Which would be 3.4, as 3.3g is supposedly the last 3.3 community release.)  In essence it comes down to different release schedules between the enterprise and community editions.

[mrogers]

Yes it is just release schedules.   However had you as a community member provided the fix we would have made sure it went onto HEAD first.

In this particular case the issue was fixed by Alfresco Engineering on the 3.3 Enterprise branch AFTER Community 3.3 was released. 

This particular fix should be on HEAD now and will be included in Community 3.4 a.

[swhitman]

However had you as a community member provided the fix we would have made sure it went onto HEAD first.

A contribution whether it is a fix or not is still a contribution. It was not a trivial task to diagnose this problem. Most of the effort was done with the zimbra folks and then posted to Alfresco once the problem was identified. I spent several hours preparing a vmware image of Alfresco for the zimbra software engineer to use. Then I installed wireshark and provided a tcp dump for them to analyze. I can imagine that it is more valuable to supply the fix, but what message are you sending to the open source community by saying solutions to your issues are delayed unless you provide the fix as well.

So what goes into the decision to produce a new community release. I was using 3.2r. I waited before installing 3.3 because it appeared the fix was not included. Then it kind of looked like the issue was being worked on and would appear soon. I then saw 3.3g, but I could not tell if the fix was in it or not. So I gave it a try. Why is there not going to be a 3.3r that at least brings the community edition up to the same patch level as the 3.3 enterprise edition before rolling out a 3.4?  I assume 3.4 will have new features. What is the progression of the community edition letters?

[mrogers]

First of all thank you for the effort in diagnosing the problem.   Since Zimbra was not one of our supported/tested platforms its unlikely that this would have been fixed without your effort. 

Hopefully the names of the community releases are now going to be consistent http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/phampton/2010/08/17/alfresco-product-naming-and-numbering/

So the next community release is 3.4 a.   And is due in a couple of weeks.  

Fixes are being found, diagnosed, fixed and tested all the time it is just timing and logistics that determines which release they go in.

In the case of ALF-1980 it was fixed May 07, Validated May 17 and merged to HEAD June 09.   

Community 3.3 g was a bit of strange release since it is "community 3.3 with google docs".   The google docs work prevented non google docs changes being merged in except for blocker priority fixes, but in this case the Enterprise 3.3 SP1 fixes were made available to the community as soon as possible after 3.3g cleared.

[swhitman]

Thanks for the link. I think the more consistent numbering of releases will help a lot.