Display list of updated skin and templates files in release notes

[surli]

Hi everyone,

we had this morning a meeting between some XWiki committers and XWiki SAS employees around the topic of XWiki upgrades which are not always easy, especially since XWiki is higly customizable.

One of the thing that makes upgrades difficult is the fact that the skin can be customized and we’re currently missing toolings to detect that a skin file has been modified and that the customization should be updated to take it into account.

We should work on that in the future, but in the meantime we can mitigate a bit the issue by providing more information in the release notes, and in particular the list of templates that have been updated.

So to clarify, the proposal is about adding a step in the release process to gather the list of modified files in xwiki-platform/xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-web/xwiki-platform-web-templates/src/main/resources/templates at master · xwiki/xwiki-platform · GitHub and xwiki-platform/xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-flamingo/xwiki-platform-flamingo-skin/xwiki-platform-flamingo-skin-resources/src/main/resources/flamingo at master · xwiki/xwiki-platform · GitHub and to publish that list in the release notes.

I don’t think we need to gather the list of any .vm files modified in any module (i.e. templates provided in a jar), but maybe I’m wrong here.

WDYT?

[vmassol]

@surli

One of the thing that makes upgrades difficult is the fact that the skin can be customized and we’re currently missing toolings to detect that a skin file has been modified and that the customization should be updated to take it into account.

What about adding an optional step in the DW that would list all custom skins in the wikis. It would find all the XWiki.XWikiSkins xobjects and then finding all the properties of these xobjects and listing them, with a link to the original content inside the XWiki instance used, and a text asking the user to do a diff between the 2 in case they want to upgrade their skin? Note that there are valid use cases for having completely different skins without wanting to merge them with the xwiki changes.

That seems simple enough to add and less error-prone, and less costly for the release. WDYT?

@surli

I don’t think we need to gather the list of any .vm files modified in any module (i.e. templates provided in a jar), but maybe I’m wrong here.

Well, they could also be customized by users in a custom skin, no?

Thanks

[tmortagne]

@vmassol

Well, they could also be customized by users in a custom skin, no?

Yes, they can, like any other template, so it does not make much sense to exclude them.