Is the six-week release cycle too frequent?

@domchristie I want to rant and rave my experience upgrading two enterprise apps the last several months.

(1.5/1.6 to 1.9/1.10, ember-rails & ember-cli, rails & php, ember-data & non-ember-data, all views to mostly components, etc). I think I’ve gone through many colors in the crazy Ember upgrade rainbow, and yet I don’t touch the core code so you could call me a “realistic” outsider dev.

First off, I love Ember, love love love, thank you all for everything you do.

I want a bigger Upgrade guides list that’s linked right from the front page on emberjs.com. Whether it’s on the main site or a github page somewhere else, I don’t care, just somewhere it can be updated often.

The release blog posts are wonderful but they’re just the tip of an upgrade iceberg. The rest of my upgrade time is spent on:

  • Google (for posts in the last 3 months)
  • Stack Overflow (for posts in the last 3 months)
  • Checking @ember or @emberwatch on twitter
  • Skimming through the audio/video/blogs on Ember Weekly
  • Checking the API guides and source code links and switching the Github tag to make sure that’s the current API
  • Poking through the dev tools and Ember Inspector for any failed promise or caught exception that isn’t documented
  • Re-checking every plugin or addon for compatibility based on Ember 1.X or ember-cli 0.x.xx
  • Checking the issues and PRs
  • Relying on 2 years of full-time Ember experience, X more years of front-end work and Zen literature to get past anything else

That’s the great thing and bad thing about open source, the answers are free but they might or might not be anywhere or nowhere! It’s mind-boggling to upgrade every time, and I’m lucky enough to know where/how to look for most of it.

I don’t expect the core team to provide a giant 1.9->1.10 page with curated links, threads, addons etc. but the community can. If we could make a big community page like that devoted to a specific upgrade, could we link to it from emberjs.com? So for all the people without the time to do endless research, they have a list where everything’s relevant to their current upgrade? And when people ask how to upgrade, we link to that?

EmberObserver does an awe-inspiring job providing context for addons. I think it would be great to do something similar for getting people over each version hump where every link is “version 1.10 approved”.

I’ll make the damn Github pages if people can help send me links to stuff.

Also at the top of every addon’s Github readme, they could put “we expect this to work with Ember 1.9+ and ember-cli 0.18-0.2”, then the first thing we all see is if we can use it with our current app’s versions.

TL;DR I <3 Ember, but I want a curated Github page devoted to specific version changes. I’ll take the lead if no one else wants to, but I’m tired of cross-checking the whole Internet with a calendar to find answers.

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