On the new AS/EAP merger

[nickarls]

I've been reading about the new AS/EAP merger and either my English isn't as good as I thought it was or perhaps I haven't had enough coffee yet but currently I'm just confused so could someone help me out here?

So:

AS 7.2.0.Final is now the EAP 6.1.0.Alpha. Can I put that one into production for free? In which branch does the fixing take place as EAP 6.1.0 matures towards Final? Can I put that that one in production for free? After the release, will there be a EAP 6.1.1 and can I get that for free and put it in production for free? Will AS 8.0.0 become EAP 6.2 or EAP 7.0? What are the Alpha discussion boards watched by Red Hat mentioned on the download page? And you are not moving the JIRA to bugzilla, are you?

[jiwils]

What are the Alpha discussion boards watched by Red Hat mentioned on the download page?

They are here.

[nickarls]

OK, thanks. I didn't see it linked anywhere on the community front page. I'm not sure I'm too thrilled about the split as the codebase will be 99% the same for both project but you get the impression that the RedHattians will only hang out there after the split...

[jaikiran]

Nicklas Karlsson wrote:

but you get the impression that the RedHattians will only hang out there after the split...

The current AS forums will continue to be as active as they are now and we'll continue to help users in these forums. That's not going to change. After all, these are volunteer driven forums - there's nothing that stops anyone from participating in here.

[marklittle]

As Jaikiran has mentioned, the community forums will continue to be actively monitored and responses will be as before. We're trying a separate forum for the EAP releases because over time the questions and answers for each will likely start to be different, e.g., we may remove something from the AS7 source because we're not going to support it in product. I think it will become confusing to hold everything in the same forum. However, we'll monitor things over the coming weeks and if separate forums looks like being too confusing we'll revisit the decision. But what I announced yesterday is meant to help all of our communities and it's definitely not our intention to drop any group. Feel free to let me know directly if you believe that is happening, but please give this a while to settle down. Thanks.

[dlmarion]

AS 7.2.0.Final is now the EAP 6.1.0.Alpha. Can I put that one into production for free?

I would like to see an answer to this question. Based on another thread I read this morning, there will not be a community release of 7.2.0. We would need to either build it ourselves (link to instructions would be great) or use EAP 6.1.0 Alpha (assuming we can deploy it in production without a license). Is this correct?

[nickarls]

Thanks for the info, just having a knee-jerk-reaction here

There will be no other community binaries for that major release of the community project after that point because the product builds are effectively a superset and we hope more beneficial to most developers.

Of course community builds of the next major revision of the project will happen in parallel so you'll be able to contribute to and track those separately, so it's not a case of replacing community with product-only binaries.

Now of course the value of the full subscription is much more than just the product binaries and support, and we all hope that people will want to migrate to a full subscription, but it's not going to be a requirement unless you want to put JBoss products into deployment.

I would like to understand this as the AS releases continue as normal but after they are released, an EAP-alpha is started and refined from there and they can be downloaded but require a full subscription for production use.

But how about the 7.2? Since there was no community release, there is nothing I can use for production for free, or?

[vijay.duvvuri]

There's an FAQ which seems to address some questions - http://www.jboss.org/jbossas/faq

From what I can understand, EAP alpha can be used in production.

[marklittle]

Check the FAQ (http://www.jboss.org/jbossas/faq) as it should answer your questions.

[marklittle]

The Alpha release(s) can be used in production. Please check the FAQ, which we're updating regularly. http://www.jboss.org/jbossas/faq

[nickarls]

And further on, we'll have the community 8.0.0.Alpha/CR/Final cycle and after that I can put 8.0.0 in production for free but work will continue with an EAP-alpha from there and there will be an EAP Alpha/CR/Final cycle after that would correspond to 8.0.1 but which the community will never see? Well see, but not use in production until the community release for 8.1.0

[nickarls]

OK. The "alpha in production" clears up the things a little. Although I'm afraid there are companies who would rather use 8.0.0.Final than something with an "alpha" in it even if the only difference would be one like in the pom.xml. You wouldn't mind calling the first EAP version 6.0.Base/Foundation?

The community can of course hope the high quality of the releases won't be sacrificed wiht "it's good enough for the community, now let's start polishing it".

BTW, will the source for the EAP releases be hosted on github in a separate branch? And will the same restrictions for production be in place even if you build it from source?

[ctomc]

Nicklas Karlsson wrote:

BTW, will the source for the EAP releases be hosted on github in a separate branch? And will the same restrictions for production be in place even if you build it from source?

Sources for all RedHat products are published on ftp, for EAP that would be ftp://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/jbeap/

no reason to change that now

--

tomaz

[rcd]

What about Maven artifacts for EAP alphas? I notice that a large ZIP file is available on the download page, but are they being published in any public repositories?

[henk53]

Tomaz Cerar wrote:

no reason to change that now

Why not? Although it's maybe not the most important thing there is, it would just be nice and consistent if the EAP sources were also available from a source repo with full history support. As has been explained many times over, JBoss EAP remains an open source product. Now the source is surely available, but with a source repo it's just much easier to see *why* a specific patch went into the code, and what its related issue number is.

Currently we can clone the github repo, copy the FTP over it, and then easily see the differences. Okay great, I'll see that in InternalEJBDispatcher a null check was removed on line 322, and there's an extra init() call, and two extra lines are commented out. But why was this done? What issue does this change solve?

Looking at it the other way around, why would you explicitly shield off the source repo for a project that's already open source?