Remove the demo flavor?

Development
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#1

Hi devs,

I’d like to propose that we remove the demo flavor for the following reasons:

  • It’s not really maintained. Right now it’s been just me and it’s a best effort and I don’t do much and always after some users find there’s a problem (which means lots of others have tried and failed to install it when that happens). Thus it’s not great to showcase XWiki’s stability. See for example: Problem installing Demo Flavor
  • I don’t think it brings any important value. The idea was to have some flagship extensions pre-installed but they’re actually not hard to install using the Extension Manager. In addition the list of bundled extensions has not been reviewed and would need regular reviews/maintenance to make sense.
  • It’s hard to make it support lots of XWiki versions, see high number of comments in the pom.xml file. I’ve just tried to update it to fix Problem installing Demo Flavor and I’m nowhere finished.
  • The reality is that the concept of flavor has not succeeded so far. We haven’t seen an explosion of flavors created by the community. There might be several reasons but the main one is probably that it’s not really needed and installing extensions by hand using the EM is probably enough.

In conclusion, I think we should remove it and improve the DW so that when there’s only a single flavor found, skip the screen asking the user to pick one. It’ll make XWiki simpler to install. In addition removing the demo flavor will also make XWiki simpler to installer since the user doesn’t need to decide which flavor to install.

WDYT?

3 Likes
Can't install demo flavor in Xwiki 13.10.9 (clean install)
Problem installing Demo Flavor
#2

The other option is to add support for Recommended in the flavor picker and only list Recommended flavors by default (and have some advanced checkbox to list not recommended one, with an explanation that they’re not supported by the core dev team and their quality/state unknown).

1 Like
#3

+1 to remove the demo flavor, and also +1 to auto-skip the step when there is only one available flavor.

Thanks

#4

Same here. +1 for both

#5

Thanks. I think the concept of recommended flavor is also interesting even though we don’t have the problem ATM with only 1 flavor (after we remove the demo one) :slight_smile: So something for later probably.

#6

+1 to remove the Demo flavor. To be defined what “auto-skip” exactly mean as it can theoretically be long to validate available flavors and finally know that only one is valid for a given wiki.

#7

For me it means the same thing as what we currently do, i.e. compute the flavors to list them and before listing them, if there’s only one, select it automatically and move to the next step.

#8

I’ve created [XWIKI-20204] Auto select a flavor when there's only one in the DW - XWiki.org JIRA for the auto skip feature of DW.

#9

Done:

Screenshot 2022-10-06 at 17.01.34

1 Like
Can't install demo flavor in Xwiki 13.10.9 (clean install)