Horde release cycle

• 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. Feel free to listen in or to add your own comments if you want to influence the direction of our future release mode.

Hudson Quickie

After my third Hudson repository using the same installation procedure it was definitely necessary to finally extract the whole Hudson specific part into its own repository.

It is nothing fancy as the installation procedure with Hudson is pretty straightforward anyhow. But maybe you want to get Hudson quickly running on your own Linux machine with a few standard plugins pre-installed. Then the repository might be exactly what you need.

Just clone the repository with

git clone git://github.com/wrobel/hudson-install.git

and follow the "Install" instructions in the README. Of course you can also just fork the repo in case you need your own predefined set of plugins installed into Hudson.

The Horde4 package mill for Debian

As mentioned before p@rdus intends to provide Horde4 packages for Debian beside the Kolab specific OpenPKG based build. The first steps of this process have been taken now and another Hudson based package mill has been created for the task. The new system bundles Horde4 packages for Debian after each upstream commit and lives here.

This is just considered a first step on the way to a full Debian release as there will be a fair amount of quality control required to get the packages fit for wider distribution. In addition the exact policy on how to handle PEAR packages on Debian is apparently still under debate. p@rdus will join this discussion now with a set of more than 50 PEAR based packages in tow.

The timing for this seems just right as there are still a few weeks left until Horde4 will see its first release. So there should be enough time to ensure that there are no major conflicts between PEAR based and Debian packaging.