Over here at MI2 we have been making some changes to the system, enhancements mostly. I would like to share them, but the extra step of testing them against the development release is too much for now. That will happen.
In the meantime it brings up an issue. There are plenty of times that the community has made fixes and enhancements that should be available as patch releases to the production released version, but I don’t see a branching model for that.
Do we have a way to request the commit of changes that are specifically designed for the current release? There is no way I can roll out the developers release to customers (too risky) but some of the enhancements that have already been done and are not risky (such as the documentation and improvement to the billing interface) should be made available as some kind of official patch that can be installed over and existing release installation.
I agree we should be able to put some of the developments in if robust and our clients will benefit. My current process has been to do my developments and test on real data in a test machine to assure no problems. Then I put that mod into production (recall, I keep a past seven days’ backups so I can revert if need be) and run for awhile until I am confident it causes no problem and actually works as planned.
Examples have been my "Justify and Last Billed" markers in the Encounters & Documents listing, the date fix in the sl_eob_invoice.php file and the Last Billed column in the Collections Report, to name a few.
Once those have worked I submit them to Rod for CVS and post them to the forums. That way anyone who wishes to use them can do so on their own.
I believe it will never be possible for the developers to be the only ones to identify bugs, but my process seems to work pretty well. I have only rolled a very few of the CVS changes in, but the fixes from the forums I use regularly. Hope that helps.