We started a demo project on Liferay 5.2.3.
We used to apply bugfixes that were backported to portal/branches/5.2.x.

Recently we realised, that we do not see any backports commited after 01-Sep-09, however we do seechanges for the trunk (5.3.0), but we'd prefer to keep the major version for a while.
So my question is:
Is this an intentional change for public SVN or should these still be available for SE users?

Is it so that the SVN guest user privliges are misconfigured, or this is a new policy, that SE users don't have access to the backports.

Thanks,
Andras

According to some discussions I had during the European Symposium the change sadly seems to be intentional.

If you know what bug to fix, backports might be relatively easy as the code locations keep relatively stable. I expect the patches to apply to previous versions to be almost the same as those to trunk.

If somebody counts votes to open the branches again: +1 from me. Speaking about transitioning to EE: It might be cheaper to pay for the basic EE and get all fixes than to pay for your time to patch the issues that you want to fix. (Note: I'm not associated with Liferay Inc other than being a user)

Yeah, sad to see that happen. I guess they are trying to push for the EE version.

Is there much community development (bug fixes) on the 5.2.x branch. I'm new to the Liferay ecosystem. Are community submitted patches on 5.2.x encouraged and accepted? Or, do most people just maintain their own ext environment for bug fixes, if they are going to stay on 5.2.x SE for any length of time?

I haven't seen any official statement of Liferay policy regarding SE branches. Do I understand correctly that patches are apparently created for EE, but never added to the equivalent SE branch?

Thanks,

Brian

The policy used to be:
SE-development is usually only in trunk, so no Liferay-provided SE-releases (or CE, Community-Edition) are to be expected from branches, once the "next" version is out.

Working with CE you usually update to the latest version or pick the bugs that you ran into (or that are critical enough to require a fix) and apply it to your system. You can usually pick the patches from any later version, as long as the code in question has not been radically changed.

Now that the 5.3 release has been delayed, it currently seems that 5.2.3 was the last CE release prior to 5.3 (schedule unknown to me). However, having talked to some of the Liferay people in Frankfurt/Offenbach, I have good faith that something will be done to address this unfortunate state until 5.3 comes out. (Have you noticed that the current EE is no longer called 5.2.4? It's now "EE SP1". IMHO this sends a nice signal. I might be wrong, but I don't want to ;)

We'll see where this leads to - I'm curious.

P.S.: The current situation is ok with me, but, of course, I could always make use of more ;)

I too vote to open up the branches again!

That said, I too am all for opening it up, but can understand (and even argue for) the current situation:

One other thing that I made clear during the discussions at the symposium was that I know that I'm contributing to an MIT-licensed project. This means that anybody can take the result of this and distribute it commercially, closed source - Liferay Inc can do, Sun can do, you could. It's fine with me and it doesn't stop me from contributing - I still get so much more than I give.

Let's keep this in mind. It's all a very fair and open game.

Thanks Olaf, I agree with you on that.