[teiid-designer-dev] Re: [teiid-dev] 6.1 Release

[John Doyle]

----- "John Verhaeg" <jverhaeg at redhat.com> wrote:

> I have to mostly agree with Hawkins on this - these projects should  
> not be tied to each other's release schedules, even from the  
> beginning.  However, the reality is treating Teiid 6.0.0 as "released"
>  
> is a misnomer until Designer 6.0.0 is released (which we should be  
> very close to doing).  Teiid is pretty much useless without at least 
> 
> *some* version of Designer being available.  We want to change that  
> fact in the future, but that's how things sit today.  In other words, 
> 
> for all practical purposes - and for this very first release only - we
>  
> need to treat the Teiid solution as a whole - both Teiid Server and  
> Designer - as *unreleased* until Designer is released.  Once Designer 
> 
> is out there, it shouldn't matter how often either project releases.  
> 
> Certainly the Designer release schedule in particular will remain  
> important to the user for the short term, since Designer is, for now, 
> 
> the only way to produce the metadata and transformations that the  
> server consumes.  Another way of putting this is, for the near term, 
> 
> Teiid releases will be irrelevant to customers until a supporting  
> version of Designer is released or unless they don't depend upon  
> tooling in the first place.  I definitely believe that while the  
> server relies on the Designer as its sole source of input, the project
>  
> needs to be diligent in documenting in its release notes what features
>  
> are available and accessible, either due to their support by Designer 
> 
> or their independence from tooling, and those that are "available" but
>  
> not accessible until a supporting version of Designer is released.  If
>  
> we don't do this, we'll just be creating our FUD within our own  
> community.

I agree with this as long as the predicate is that there is a version of tooling (Designer or other) that we have validated to work with the Teiid release (excepting the new features in the Teiid release as you described above). 

> 
> Regarding the connector testing issues John originally referred to, if
>  
> there really is a Designer dependency, then that connector should  
> probably should even be advertised as available until a supporting  
> version of the Designer is available.  My disclaimer is I don't really
>  
> understand the particular issue with the connector, so I might be way 
> 
> off here...

The general problem I'm referring to here not truly a Designer dependency, but rather a model dependency.  New connector features often expect new modeling constructs that can be difficult for a user to get right.  Currently Designer importers are the only solution, but with other tooling that will change.