Comment 14 for bug 1151947

My Opinion about schema changes policies: IMHO being allowed to make an important change or not is all related to the amount of testing and communication you do around it.

That is: in general you don't kill yourself in manual testing and communication and only do the automatic testing which doesn't have a really big effective coverage. That's why usually you should not make important changes such as schema in a stable release.

That being said, you can still very well do a change and do a ton of testing and communicate around apologizing for the change and explaining why changing is better than letting it broken. Just like you would do if bug is a security fix for instance.

So IMHO, when the software is at this barely mature stage of development, with that kind of regressions inside, sometimes trying to always enforce a policy is stupid and instead efforts should be made to fix the issues.

If OpenERP was as stable and as rigorous as say a Linux Kernel, I would never defend breaking rules. But what I say is that the apparent professionalism given to OpenERP is unfortunately mostly only an apparent surface, so may be it's just better to simply bite the bullet, admit things aren't as serious as it looks yet and fix things while it's time.

Meanwhile I wish one day OpenERP become professional and stable. But to do that, instead of just enforcing apparent policies, roadmaps will need to be published and discussed with the community, not just publish a release note once everything has been screwed by some relatively un-experienced programmer in the dark of a trunk branch may be/may be not stable in a year.

So let's talk about how to improve things in the future. There is supposed to be a 7.1 version a 8.0 version? What is the time frame? what is the roadmap for each release? Speaking about policies, will there be a RC (Release Candidate) this time may be?
Or will you just publish the magic release one day as a surprise with may be some bad magic changes inside and then let things broken under the claim you enforce some professional policy?

Sorry for saying it and please to take that personally. I would love to see things change, but may be it all starts with stopping denial and biting the bullet and being professional in the whole product development cycle, not just when it's too late with the no change policy.

That being said think you for your work and for trying to fix things.