[Opensource] CVS Lockdown

[Michael Rimov]

Hey All, I need to do some rambling, so please lend me your ear for a 
minute. :)

I'm now asking everybody with committer access to not commit any new 
features to Expresso 4.1.  Please limit all commits to bugfixes 
only.  After this ea is released, we will branch CVS and all new features 
should be checked into the Expresso 4.2 branch, and we will continue to 
perform only bugfixes and low-risk additions to the 4.1 code base.  The 
only 'new' features I would advocate are additions that assist in debugging 
installations, for example, an idea would be to extend the status 
controller to list all Packages in the system with all the version 
information that we can glean.  As you can see, however, this is low risk 
to the rest of the system.

This was a difficult decision for me to make.  There are several things I 
wanted to accomplish for the 4.1 code base that haven't been done 
yet:  Unified DBObject interfaces so that DBMaint can handle both 
MultiDBObjects and SecuredDBObjects, for example, not to mention the other 
myriad little improvements running around in my head.  However, the hardest 
part of this decision was recognizing that I wasn't going to be able to get 
all the new feature patches that several of you have submitted to me. (In 
plenty of time, I might add)

I made my decision based upon the fact that the community hasn't truly 
gotten a new Expresso release in over 6 months.  By and large, Expresso 4.1 
ea's have become more stable than Expresso 4.02, and I feel that the people 
that are working to put a production system into place deserve fixes to 
several of the bugs that we've come across in 4.02.  I ALWAYS hated 
situations that occurred while working with an open source project where I 
heard that a major feature or bug fix was all complete and sitting in a 
repository if I was only willing to use the nightly build or the beta.... 
which, of course, for a production environment, I simply cannot do.

To those of you that have contributed patches that haven't made it into 
CVS:  Tong Sun, David Knight, Brian Showalter, Brian Rook, and others, I 
truly appreciate your patches, and I'm sorry that time constraints haven't 
permitted me to work with them.  I should note that after the branch, if 
somebody with committer access was willing to take on some (or one!) of the 
backlogged patches, I would be extremely grateful and would send them the 
patches.

After 4.1 is released, I will be continuing to work on reported bugs which 
will then be rolled up in release 4.11, 4.12 etc.

All new features will be put into the 4.2 code base.  My goal here is to 
provide the user community with a more stable code base that they can 
develop their apps from.

I understand that working with the two code bases will provide some 
headaches to make sure that all patches in 4.1 make it into 4.2, but I 
believe at this point that the benefits far outweigh the problems caused by 
only having one viable code base.

As always, constructive feedback, and thoughts welcome. ;)

Regards to all,
						-Mike