Feature Backports

This is an idea I just thought up for a new TopicClassification and I wanted to see if there's any demand. A lot of new features are going to be present in CairoRelease, but upgrading can be difficult and our release schedule has been a lot slower than we'd like. With these factors in mind, it might be valuable for there to be a central place for community and core developers to make backports available. Backports are patches to add specific new features to a current or past release. This allows more conservative site admins to get access to newer functionality without having to deal with the problems inherent in running beta- or alpha-level code. It also allows those without the time or resources to do a full upgrade to cherry-pick the most important features for their specific environment. (Hopefully the latter issue will fade as we improve the ease-of-upgrade for TWiki.)

A specific example I'm planning on putting together is a compatibility module for trivial additions to the FuncDotPm API that plugin authors would like to be able to rely on and start using now without breaking compatibility with the current release. I'm sure other ideas will likely appear as the gap between the current beta releases and the last production release grows.

-- WalterMundt - 21 Apr 2004