Is v2.2 RC2a stable? Why still only an RC?

[totsubo2000]

Hi, I'm looking using osCommerce as my shopping cart solution and had a few general questions:

 

1- The current version is v2.2 RC2a. Is it stable?

2- v2.2 RC2a was released almost 2 years ago, why is it still marked as an RC and not a 'proper' release?

3- The fact that there hasn't been a new release in almost two years is a bit worrisome. I can understand that maybe all new effort is going into v3, but that is still in Alpha and there hasn't been a new release in over 6 months.

 

osCommerce looks good but a 2 year release cycle makes me pause. Should I be worried?

[Ben Nevis]

With so many people using it, it has to be stable :) Why it's still only an RC I'll leave to people who are 'on the team' or who've been around far longer to answer! It seems to be a frequent and probably justified criticism from 'outside' that OsC 'official' development is very slow. But here you will find a huge user group and vast array of user-contributed addons (which admitedly don't always work together), and a store that has 'relatively' simple code that there is at least half a chance of understanding, all of which can help customise your store the way you want, rather than having something that has more bells and whistles out of the box but on which you soon hit a brick wall if you want to change something yourself. My 2c anyway.

[Ben Nevis]

Ok, here's another 2c., just some speculation and opinion as to why there may have been no further official releases for quite a long time:

 

1) If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Of course, 'broke' can be a relative term. There are many criticisms that can be levelled at OsC's codebase: There is no separation of logic and display functions, the display aspects tend to be a morass of infinitely nested tables that makes inadequates use of stylesheets, there is no API to allow contributions to be simply added without modifying the codebase itself and would mean that installing one should not break another etc.

 

2) In the absence of a strong lead from a development team, OsC's development has been very flat. Users have had to make their own contributions to make up for the gaps in the basic product, and even more users have used them and made their own modifications to the modifications introduced by the addon contributions. OsC's greatest strength - the relatively easy entry point into the codebase and the huge array of user-contributions - has become its greatest weakness. It seems to me it would be an impossible task to make a new version of OsC that would be backwardly-compatible with the 'current' version. This probably means that if ever another official version of OsC sees the light of day, shop owners will have significant rebuild work to do on their store even if they can import the product data, if they want to upgrade. If your store is already working the way you want, why would you do that?

 

I hence don't really expect to see a new version of OsC anytime soon and probably not for a long time. My prediction - OsC will continue to be just as it is - a mass of building blocks you can work with to make a store look as you want and do what you want, and if you can't you'll find something else that does.

 

In saying all that, I'm here because I use OsC and it does what I want.. after adding and changing things...