Can someone help me understand why yesterday the GA2 release date on the roadmap page was listed as May 11th and now today it is showing as June 8th?: http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS#selectedTab=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project%3Aroadmap-panel

Is it ever safe to rely on the date listed there?

Same exact question here!
I have delayed an installation for a new client based on that schedule.
Till friday afternoon there was no clue about a change (a full month), neither on forums nor on twitter.
No clues before, no explanations after.
It's a little disappointing, especially when you have to justify a broken promise to your client...
What happened?

The date in JIRA is our target date but it's not set in stone so it is subject to change. We have a lot of dependencies for this release with Marketplace and Social Office. If you need predictability and SLAs then I'd suggest going with EE.

Agree. Doesn't make sense to make agreements with clients hoping that CE release date won't be changed.

@Mika

Thanks for your authoritative answer

@Juan

Thanks for sharing you experience in this field

To both:
Just to share a thought with you and not making a flame about this
I'm not deep into Liferay (as I would like to be), since I'm striving since at least a year to switch our current CMS to LR.

Making a long story short and omitting many details, CE is a "bridge" to making a choice about EE adoption, so first, IMHO,
you go CE for some projects for some months and when all is fine you can offer to your clients/Boss to switch to paid version (with support and SLA and other things).
And by the way, that MY personal aim (I'm a developer with a little "steering power" ), so I'm NOT against choosing paid EE at all.

That said, for the specific case, since CE stands for Community Edition, I guess that maybe a forum post or a little tweet from Liferay staff anticipating that this week planned CE release won't cut it, would be appreciated by the community itself, instead of a shift of 4 week the next time that you go to see the "due date" page field.
I had seen in some posts that 6.1.1 GA2 has been delayed since mid-february/march and have seen that current bug fixing graph on Jira is practically on break-even point, so , yes, I 'hoped" that there shouldn't have been issues about the planned release and that, if were there delays, would have been some days.
So yes, I guess I should have had "bytes at hand" :-) before making an (informal btw) agreement.

So, it's not a tragedy to me now, but, is it possible to share some kind of up-to-date info about the releases (and/or major LR-Related events) to the Community, maybe just via Twitter or something, please?
Hope not appearing offensive about this kind of "Community Communication Enhancement Request" ;-)

Regards,

Diego

Thanks for sharing Diego. You are absolutely right we should communicate possible missed release dates more openly and earlier to everyone but we are still working on our internal processes so that we have better visibility to delays. As a former community member I do understand that we don't communicate enough with the community although James Falkner our community manager has greatly improved that. BTW waiting 6.1.1 myself too to upgrade my own site.

My personal opinion is that it's better not to publicized a "target release" date that's going to change. It would be better if a date that is going to change be kept just internally.

I'm one of the people asking for release date, but it doesn't do me any good to have a date that's going to change so often. It's just better to hear that you've haven't really set it yet.

The 6.1.1 CE GA2 is still in progress:
610 of 619 issues have been resolved
DoeÄS anybody know it will be released in this month an can I use der Plugins from 6.1.1 CE GA2
with 6.1.0 CE GA1?
(I could not compile SVN-Versions of some, because of new annotations in GA2)
Thanks
Frank

I don't think anybody including most of Liferay.com staff actually can state that it will be released this month or not.
Several Liferay.com staffs have posted here about the release dates earlier before but they all turned out to be false alarm.



Plugins for newer versions usually don't work with older versions because liferay.com often changes the api and sometimes variable names too.

I think I'm going to conclude that the next release is probably going to be somewhere in fall from liferay release cycle.

The release date that was first given as sometimes in April may have been a bogus by a marketing team
to make users try to use a very buggy 6.1.0 and to switch to purchasing the EE version.

The bottom line is, don't use the 6.1.0 CE version because the quality is sub-standard. Either purchase the 6.1 EE version or stick with the 6.0.6 CE version.

I'm really sorry that we don't communicate better - I tried with 6.1.1 and Marketplace but we're just not at a point as a project to be able to definitively say 6 months out when a release will be ready. It's more like 7-10 days, and we're not within that window yet. Normally, we pick a cutoff date internally, then once we reach that date, the code goes into several test rounds - after the first one, we're fairly confident that it'll be ready after the final QA round, so we can talk definitively about that. This GA2 release is special as Mika pointed out - lots of interdependencies between GA2, Marketplace, and SO 2.0. So most of the issues we've found as due to that interdependency, so we keep delaying. My hope is that once we're over this hurdle, the next ones will be smoother. I think I speak for everyone when I say thanks for all of your collective patience and I promise to work on our communication.

I think it's just not me who feel a little bit disappointment because I believed that community involved bug squad and verifier programs were meant to help speed up community releases and I would be able to see and show others the output from the involvement.

The output from those programs (bugsquad and verifier) is in the 6.1 GA1 release and will eventually be in GA2, so do not worry about that! But the GA2 delay is not something those programs could have helped.

While on the subject where is the "fix" for these serious security fixes I was promised

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2012/May/81
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2012/Apr/151
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2012/Apr/149

It's almost criminal to not resolve these issues on the community edition

Seriously heinous.

We're setting up the team now to handle community security fixes, so hang on.

This brings a good point.
It would be nice to at least see the patches for bugs and issues that resulted from the bug and verifier community project available to the community by now. I thought the end date was determined based on the planned release date.

Liferay 6.1.1 CE GA2

I just saw that the release date has been postponed again...

Please stick with the current target date and release Liferay 6.1.1 CE GA2 even if there are unfixed issues! Any unresolved issues not fixed by july 27th should be moved to GA3.

We're using Liferay for our student portal and for almost a year, we have been planning to use Liferay in a more extensive way. Liferay 6.1 introduces major differences in the UI so we have installed 6.1.0 GA1 in our test environments to allow the teams resposible for managing the portal to learn the new environment.

All of our teams efforts to create new organizations, sites, templates etc. has been made for 6.1.
We've also put off improvements and new development within our existing Liferay version and have instead been working with the 6.1 API.

Since the GA1 version is not fit for production, we have been trying to assure management that 6.1.1 GA2 will be released before the fall semester. As the release date keeps pushing forward, I'm starting to get very worried. We will be in a very difficult position if all the work that's been put into 6.1 won't be available for the fall semester.

It's been said (see Mikas answer above) that we should get the EE version if we need predictability. I understand and accept this point of view. There's a good chance that we will get the EE version if this project works as well as everybody hopes. But in our current process, we really need to get GA2 to become operational.

You're all doing a great job with Liferay, believe, hope and pray that GA2 will be released on july 27th

Regards
/Thomas

Here's the thing. The GA2 wont be production ready either. nor will GA 9001 be. They want you to buy the enterprise edition. It's best to give your management the bad news now.

Truth be told. If you don't get the support, a license is not *that* expensive. But I think most people would have chosen a different platform had they known about this up front. I know i would have.

I guess a group of dedicated people could always decide to fork the Liferay codebase, and put in an effort to stabilize the community editions and make them production ready but so far this hasn't happened.