Hi Stefan! I think that given you are a core team member, maintaining 12 canary apps may not be a realistic gauge of the issues that many others face. This was highlighted when Tom and Yehuda ran workshops in the pre-1.0 days.
It’s difficult to detail precise pain points. I tend to upgrade ember-cli at the same time, so perhaps therein lies the problem, and I’m confusing the two? My recent pain points have mainly been as a result of the 1.8, 1.9, and 1.10 upgrades, but I’m never quite sure which part of the stack is responsible: it is an ember issue, or an ember-cli issue? Going through Stack Overflow questions, and GitHub issues usually comes up with a solution, but it can be time-consuming, and it can often feel like a temporary hack.
(Aside: With ember-cli, ember’s dependencies now feels quite weighty—node/io, npm, bower, broccoli, qunit, jshint—most of which are not controlled by the ember core team, which can lead to unexpected changes to workflow. e.g. QUnit syntax changes.)
Just to reiterate, I think my main issue is that the faster things move, the faster things goes out-of date, the more work has to go into keeping up-to-date, and the less productive one becomes. In particular things like:
- Guides
- GitHub issues
- Stack Overflow answers
- Blog posts
- Add-ons
If content from these sites could refer to any one of 8 or 9 versions in the last year, then learning is not going to be easy. From this perspective, so it’s not surprising that the documentation remains a frequent criticism.
Frequent additions and deprecations add to the (already steep) learning curve. Concepts that developers have spent time learning and mastering, begin to disappear, which is obviously frustrating.
I appreciate the work the community does to get releases out. I also appreciate the eagerness to get releases out, particularly given the current framework landscape, but I think it’s rate-of-change may be affecting productivity. My feeling is that six weeks does seem a bit extreme (and Chrome doesn’t seem to be the most stable software right now). Having said that I’d be happy to accept that I’m wrong 