The release of TYPO3 6.0 beta1 was scheduled to be released this week also marking the feature freeze.
We decided to postpone the release of the first beta version of TYPO3 6.0 for several reasons.
First of all we have a lot of nice features pending in our review system, which still only need a final approval. One of them is a rewritten extension manager, which will ease the import and installation of extensions a lot. It would be a pity to not include those features just because of following a strict date for the beta release.
Currently Susanne Moog, Christian Kuhn, Oliver Hader and Helmut Hummel are meeting for three days to get these "low hanging fruits" merged into the core. Everybody is welcome to help out with reviews and comments during this weekend.
The other reason for postponing the beta release is that we want to rename all classes in the TYPO3 core to make use of proper namespaces. Thomas Maroschik wrote a PHP refactoring tool which will do most of the work automatically. In the end, if everything works out well, we will have full namespace support and at the same time a backwards compatibility layer so that extensions which use the old class scheme will still work. These changes must be well prepared and take time, but we think they are worth it. In the very unlikely case that it does not work out and these changes cause more problems than expected, we will have to revert them and deliver TYPO3 6.0 without renamed classes.
Last but not least, the security releases this week also were very time intensive, so that we could not finish the above mentioned tasks.
New Timeline for the beta1 Release
- The master branch will be open for new features until Sunday, 19th of August 2012
- The feature freeze will be Monday, 20th of August 2012. Additionally there will be a total merge freeze starting from that date. No changes are allowed to go in, except changes related to namespaces. The merge freeze will stay until announced otherwise. It will end latest with the release of TYPO3 6.0beta1, but hopefully earlier. The feature freeze will of course stay for TYPO3 6.0.
- The beta release will be on Tuesday, 28th of August 2012.
