community.aegirproject.org

The Future

While we're very proud of what we've accomplished in Aegir 2.0, we've also been working in parallel to port Aegir to Drupal 7. Aegir 3.0 will begin as a fairly straight-forward port. As such, we'll be releasing our first (pre-)alpha of Aegir 3 shortly. We would like to have a stable Aegir 3.0 release before the release of Drupal 8, to allow for users to transition as Drupal 6 enters its end-of-life phase.

In the 3.x cycle, we'd like to move to Semantic Versioning. This should allow us to add functionality in point releases, so long as they're API compatible. This should allow for more frequent additions of functionality, without having to wait for a full new version release.

Another reason for this change of approach is that we've been discussing a full re-write of Aegir for some time, and would like to do so with Aegir 4. The changes are likely to be fairly drastic, and so we want to be able to keep moving Aegir 3 forward in the mean time. By moving to Drupal 7, we expect to have bought ourselves 2+ years of breathing room within which to accomplish this re-architecture.

When the Aegir project started (back in 2008), the free software options for systems management software were very limited. As a result, we wrote our own code to do things like deploying code, writing configuration files, starting and stopping services, and so forth. Now, as 2014 begins, there are a wealth of tools that perform subsets these functions, each with their own communities supporting them. We are exploring how we might be able to leverage these tools, rather than maintaining our own partial implementations, that will never likely be as robust as these more specialized projects.

We feel that the time is opportune since Drupal 8 will require significant re-writing of the front-end components. In addition, re-writing the backend so completely will allow us to seriously consider moving to a programming language other than PHP; one that would be better suited to the project's long-term goals, such as Python or Ruby.