Release cycle

Hi,
I noticed that beside "major" releases that comes with every new version of nopCommerce you also release "minor" releases with bug fixes. Are there release notes available somewhere?
The thing is that now I download the package from this website from time to time and notice that the size of the file changed from previous download. Then I have to perform diff using some tool to find out what actually changed.
What would be REALLY cool if you could publish some kind of SCM repository (preferably Mercurial ;-)) with templates/plugins so we can integrate theese changes easily using well-known tools and operations. (Nowadays it's really hard to integrate the changes especially when I changed provided templates previously)

Anyhow, you are doing great job!
Cheers,
bubli

Hi bubli,

Thank you for your feedback it is much appreciated.
When we have a bug fix, a small code improvement or any optimization we do upload a new version, so that any new clients can directly use the latest version.
The deployment of the latest packages is part of our continuous integration and we can ship a new version at any time (after a successful build and all tests pass) within a few minutes, which is good but as you correctly pointed it could be a bit frustrating when you notice some changes and don't know what they are. After a new release of nopCommerce there are days in which we upload a new improved version more than 3-4 times per day. This lasts around a week or two after we release the new versions and then we usually upload new versions only on customer requests for bug fixes. Probably one per week or one per two-three weeks. We do try not to make any breaking changes within the same major release i.e 2.6, so it is safe to upgrade to a newer version at any time. The problem as you said is when you have already done some changes in the Razor views or the css files you need to know which files have been changed and need to be merged. We can think of a way to publish all the changes between the different versions. It won't help much as it will be just a list of improvements but can give you an idea if you need to merge something or not.
Actually we use SVN internally, so the Mercurial idea probably won't work in our case.
To be honest we are don't have much experience using Mercurial.
Could you elaborate more on how it would help if you have a Mercurial repository from which you can obtain the latest version. Probably you will have a new branch with your changes and merge our changes into yours?

Any ideas will be welcome and we will do our best to improve the update process for our clients.

P.S: What tool do you use for merging?

Best Regards,
Nop-Templates Support Team

Hi,
I mentioned Mercurial mainly because nopCommerce team uses it, as well as myself :-)
The point is, that using any source control management tool for publishing fixes/updates will help us with integrating new versions of your plugins and themes.
Actually,  I have created a repository with source code that comes from provided zip archives. And I created branch with my changes. So when I download new zip archive, I unpack it, commit to "trunk" repository and then merge the changes to my "customizations" branch.
It would be nice if the "trunk" repository was maintained by you, so we can easily retrieve newest updates just by calling "pull/update" command, without need for downloading zip archives, etc...
I'd suggest using some distributed SCM tool (I vote for Mercurial, but git would be equally good) so we can branch/fork/make-pull-request easily ;-)

bubli

And about merging: I use a tool that is integrated to TortoiseHg.

Many many thanks for your suggestion!
It is a great one!
Now we need to think how to implement it internally.
We will keep you posted.

Many thanks again!

thanks very much!