Improve information about the level of support of extensions

Development
#21

I think that’s fine and an implementation detail. When registering support for an extension, we can have a “free / paid” checkbox/radio button (and visually display a different icon based on that).

About instead of performing a release, note that I was not suggesting that supporters had to perform a release or anything like that.

Could you elaborate a bit on how this date field would work? A supporter would commit to supporting an extension until a given date? If so, what prevents the supporter to put 10 years for example (and disappearing after 2)?

I think I still prefer to ask every year to any supporter if they still support the extension by sending an email to all supporters once per year. Then, we would provide a singe page listing all extensions marked as supported by a given supporter with the ability to confirm support for all at once or individually, for a new year.

I’d do that for community or companies. I see this less as a problem as long as the company is around → I see it as a problem for companies too since they may not support the same set of extensions every year, dropping some and adding some others, so I still think that even companies should review their support once every year.

What’s important IMO is to present it all in a single page for a global view and and have an easy way to renew all if they’re still ok.

Technically the renewal could be done by storing the current date (per supporter) and we would send a new email one year after that date. Maybe that’s what you meant by the date field?

Thanks

#22

Same for me.

#23

Yes, exactly, my idea was that we would store the current date, and we could validate both that this date is not in the future and not more than one year in the past.

My point with no expiration for companies was that a company might consider to support most of XWiki core which consists of quite some extensions and renewing that support date every year sounds like quite some work. Maybe we should ask those who want to indicate the support (XWiki SAS sales/support?) about their opinion.

#24

Yes, hence my proposal about the one click renewal page for all extensions supported by a supporter.

#25

Okay, that sounds good then.

#26

Hei hei,

Overall the proposal looks great to me.

TL;DR is :

  • Proposal 1, 3, 4 : +1
  • Proposal 2 : +1, considering the idea of having one page per organization allowing to renew the support of extensions

The idea of doing a distinction between “free / community” support and “paying / professional” support is very interesting IMO. It seems to me that this “free / paid” decision should be made at the plan level, not necessarily at the extension level. The “XWiki Development Team” organization could have a “XWiki Core” plan marked as “free / community support”.

Overall, I think I can see how this would look like on e.x.o., however I’m wondering how the UI could look like when it comes to displaying extension in the EM. In case we have a lot of organization, it could be quite challenging to :

  • Display support information on each extension in the EM
  • Display filters to search for extensions that are supported by specific organization.

I guess this is more of a topic to discuss after making these decisions.

#27

Yes, the idea is to define the free/paid support at the support definition level (it wouldn’t make sense at the extension level since all extensions of exo are open source free but their support isn’t necessarily free). It’s a good idea to define it at the plan level rather than at the organization (to allow organizations offering both free and paid support levels depending on the plan).

Yes the UI still needs to be defined for both exo and the EM. The 2 bullet points you listed are what I had in mind too in term of use cases. There are other more subtle use cases but for later (like being notified when the extensions you use have a change in their support definition).

Thanks

#28

I’ve now created a design page to try to regroup everything that was said (and a bit more): https://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/SupportedBy

Don’t hesitate to continue discussing here and I’ll sync that design regularly once we agree about stuff.

#29

One open question is backward compatibility:

  • Existing XS instances will continue to ask e.x.o to return “recommended” extension, and thus we will need to find a rule for it:
    • Proposal: Any extension having at least one support plan registered for it will be considered “recommended”

WDYT?

#30

Hi,

+1 for 1, 2, 3 and 4 with the same notice to have the possibility to review globally (since we have a lot of extensions now)

For the backward compatibility I think we need the possibility to define the plan(s) that will be assigned for the old “recommended” notion (some plans might not cover all the current recommended list).

Thank you for all the work!