brian wrote
However, I am now in limbo and cannot upgrade either until DNN resolves issues. This is a live ecom site for a real customer with a real business. I now must tell them I don't know.. it's when it is ready so deal with it.. oh but the core team encourages the use of the software as a real world solution framework.
90% use DNN to host family pictures.. but the 10% are impacted at a much higher level.
Personally Brian, if you upgraded a productions site without.....
1) Installing the upgrade on a "test/QA" server and verifing all the site features still worked as expected.
2) Made a backup of the orginal site files and DB so you could easily roll-back the changes, before upgrading the production site.
Then you have no grounds to stand on complaining how your customer sites has been adversely affected. The core team or the quality of the release is not the reason you have to tell them "You do not know" and "When it is ready deal with it". The reason you have to tell your customer that is becuase you yourself did not follow "best practices" for deploying an upgrades to production. You should always test upgrades and backup files/DB (QA and Prod) before you deploy any upgrades. That is true of any project you deploy (ASP.NET, Smart App, etc) not just DNN.
You state the core does not have any QA testing process in place, but you obviously don't have any QA processes in place either for upgrades for your mission critical customer sites. No one on the core will say the QA process is perfect for the core modules or the core, but they are better than then were a year ago and we are continuing to put processes in place to keep improving this process. The module release tracking functionality was the first on many steps, and the next will be to implement a more formal TestCase process for all the core modules. After that we will look at using the same module for the core.
One final thought: You keep saying that DNN has past the point of being free, but you refuse to becom a benefactor. Action speak louder than words.