Dev Chat Summary – July 11th

This post summarizes the dev chat meeting from June 20th (agenda, Slack archive).

Where to post dev chat questions for the agenda

Agenda posts (comments), or #core room on slack.

ETAs on release dates

We’re literally timing release dates to quarters at present.

3.2 is due for release october 4th

Roadmaps

Discussion about how WC can open up the roadmap and priorities. Highlights:

Could a page something like this be created https://make.wordpress.org/cli/handbook/roadmap/ that provides general philosophy/plans for releases
Then at the bottom, if you want to be really helpful, pull in the GitHub Issues via the API with milestones so there is a single source of truth on both:
1. general overview of release plans
2. specific features/issues etc. planned for near term releases
(Really the first part is the most important IMO, even if that’s changing, we’d still have a place to refer to)

On releases:

no one ever knows what’s being done or what’s going to happen. The shorter release cycles were a surprise once 3.1 beta dropped, we had no idea we should be planning for that kind of release cycle ahead of that announcement (and we almost missed a critical issue with 3.1 because of that).

On announcements:

If the roadmap said in 8 months that core will be *entirely* rewritten and *everything* would break, then it says it, but at least it says it, and isn’t in rooms, githubs, and discussions that almost the entire WC community doesn’t know exists.

On target audience:

I’m not asking for me, I’m asking for the people I go into a room with talking about big businesses on a platform that when the business asks “I heard that they update and break a lot” I can’t answer “yeah but thats not going to happen anymore” and they take my word for it. We have 3.3 planned, sure, but 3.4, 3.5, is there going to be a 3.9? whats in 3.9? what’s 4.0 look like? when is 4.0? 1 year, 5 years?

Result:

we’ll start the roadmap page idea over the coming weeks.

3.1 feedback

Well done on backward compatibility and thank you! That is all my feedback.

<3