Lee Jordan 3 Years Ago This is a great post! Thank you for sharing. From my own experience and I know what the response will be to this, patching is too broad. If Liferay is modular we should be able to "get the fix pack for Alloy Editor", or "apply the patch for message boards". We can't. We never have been able to, none of us have. I find the time it takes to successfully patch a Liferay Instance that has been touched by customization is in the order of at least 3 to 4 months. At times we use beyond compare to run say our " JSP file" against Fixpack 93's file to see what Liferay changed. What can happen is that Liferay make a fix or improvement but our file overrides Liferay's, so we must work to understand the change. That in itself is hindered when we go to a pull request and it 404's. Patching is made virtually useless by the approach that Liferay take to overriding, that in order to "change a file" we must take a copy of the file and build our own module for it. The same in the theme too, if you want to tweak a CSS file, you must take that from build into src. The problem in the theme there are hundreds of files. Every "override" adds time to review and implement a fixpack release. In the theme directories I have flatly refused to override Liferay's theme files, instead I import my own SCSS files that will not clash with Liferay's, when there is a clash I understood deeply what I did in the first place and because all I need to do is review what liferay changed, I can make my adjustments faster. All that to say ... A fix pack touches the entire portal. Often the Jira tickets lack details that can allow us to understand the changes, therefore making verification of fixes almost impossible. If we don't pay attention and blindly patch, we can find Elastic search breaks, the asset publisher stops working, that's my first clue Elastic search broke. And again all that to say, if the entire portal wasn't being patched, we could focus on fixes, take less time to patch and get a more stable release to production where things are actually getting fixed instead of getting more broken and more unstable. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel
Lee Jordan 3 Years Ago To give complete technical feedback too, I've noticed that some changes will say change a method name, further on down in the imported files. Personally I'm a front end developer and I routinely have to look at Java code. I don't understand it, I need to take a shower afterwards ... but I can read code regardless. What I can't do is go through a maze of API's and Javadocs to understand what changed and why, so that I can fix the if or case statement in the the asset publisher view file say. And again if your project has deviated from vanilla Liferay, it's very difficult to patch which should alarm Liferay more than it does us the folks trying to keep in step with changes. If you think about it we're as much custodians of Liferay's reputation as Liferay themselves are. If not in terms of security issues which can harm both of us then in terms of reliability and stability. Liferay is too hard to patch. Please sign in to reply. Reply as... Cancel