fedora 7 schedule (was Re: Fedora 7 planing)

[Bill Nottingham]

Luis Villa (luis at tieguy.org) said: 
> >1. dropping it would be a regression vs FC5.
> >2. It's a major line item for RHEL5, and Fedora is supposedly
> >   where stuff like this gets beaten into shape first.
> 
> (1) makes sense, though in that case there is an obvious question
> about 'why was that last, broken patchset allowed in so late?'

It was broken for a while. Generally, with upstream Xen based on 2.6.16,
and Fedora based on upstream-current, you have to pick which one you're
going to break - you either freeze upstream kernel, or freeze Xen and
fix it up. Going with the upstream kernel is the right choice, but then
you get into the Xen-screws-you problem.

> As far as (2) goes, I thought Fedora was an independent project?

We are responsible to our various downstream distributions, whether
they be OLPC, RHEL, or others. We certainly could be (and probably
should be) more independent.

> >I find it hard to talk about Xen in person without cursing. Really.
> 
> That makes the question even more pressing, then. Assume Xen is
> horribly broken come April 23rd. What will Fedora do? What process
> will the board go through to make that decision? The earlier you know
> what that process is, the better you can plan.

Kill it. STAB STAB STAB.

*Ahem*.

> >tbh, I agree with you. Fedora should not be hostage to RHEL feature 
> >requirements.
> >Merging Xen was the single biggest headache I've faced in kernel 
> >maintainence
> >in the last 3.5 years.  Even NPTL against the RHL 2.4 kernels was a walk
> >in the park compared to this fiasco.
> 
> So whose responsibility is it to make that call? (Or alternately, to
> public admit that that call can't be made?) Again, the earlier the
> policy is decided on, the better for everyone.

For FC6, we had bi-weekly status meetings consisting of the QA lead,
the rel-eng lead, heads of areas of concentration (kernel, desktop, etc),
and random interested parties. I suspect it comes down to that group.

> Does Will have the power in these meetings to change priorities and
> direct engineering resources towards the end of a cycle? e.g., during
> the FC7 meetings, what will happen if he screams about Xen? :)

No. Actually, that's one of the issues with Fedora at the moment - since
it's engineered as a general part of everyone's schedule, but not
specifically scheduled, it's very hard to retask engineers with 'do this
for Fedora.'

Bill