Here’s a summary of the November 20 Dev Chat (agenda / Slack archive).
Announcements
@clorith asked, “Would it be an idea to also allow for an anonymous form to submit to that? I know some folks may not be comfortable with the potential for conflict A conflict occurs when a patch changes code that was modified after the patch was created. These patches are considered stale, and will require a refresh of the changes before it can be applied, or the conflicts will need to be resolved., and may feel safer giving an honest feedback if it wasn’t all public under their name? Then the feedback could be provided by the leads under a followup post, with no relation to individuals.”
@francina said she’d change the post to mention that anyone who’d like to give feedback privately is welcome to do so. 5.3 release leads @davidbaumwald, @youknowriad, @justinahinon, @audrasjb also committed to offering the same.
Upcoming Releases
5.3.1
@whyisjake offered the current list of tickets in the milestone at https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?group=status&milestone=5.3.1
After a quick discussion of potential release dates, December 11, 2019 came out a potential winner. It’s pretty soon, but it still gives us time to triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. 5.3 regressions and bugfixes. That decision is not final – it’s pending more discussion in the comments.
Got thoughts on timing? Please leave them in the comments – the sooner the better.
While we see how those conversations shake out, @audrasjb graciously offered to lead the first 5.3.1 bug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. scrub on Thursday November 21, 2019 18:00 UTC
Next up: a call for volunteers to lead the release.
@sergeybiryukov, @audrasjb, @amykamala, @marybaum, and @whyisjake all raised their hands. Everyone expressed great confidence in the potential candidates.
Want to be part of the 5.3.1 release squad? Please leave a comment.
Open floor
@youknowriad brought up a discrepancy in the release cadence between WordPress Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/:
By December 11, the date proposed for a 5.3.12 release, Gutenberg will be ahead of Core with about 5 releases and this is a problem. 12 Gutenberg releases shipped into 5.3 . This is too much for a single WordPress release and with the current schedule, it’s seems like this is going to be similar for 5.4. This is not tenable for the future. It’s hard to stabilize and ship, it’s hard to summarize the changes for third-party [developers] and users, it’s more scary to ship and people were recommending the plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party to be installed for their clients (and it’s risky since the plugin is a development plugin). So how to reduce that gap is a big issue that needs solving IMO.Ideally I do think a shorter release cycle for majors is better. (Why not just a 5.4 in like end of January). [O]therwise we’ll have to include enhancements in minors.
This generated a long discussion that continued well past the end of the Dev Chat. See the full conversation starting here.
@davidbaumwald led the chat and wrote these notes. @marybaum did some editing.
#5-3, #dev-chat, #summary
