Lessons Learned

Stephen John Smoogen smooge at gmail.com
Wed Mar 21 17:02:28 UTC 2007


On 3/19/07, Jonathan Blandford <jrb at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 15:36 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
> > On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Luis Villa wrote:
> >
> > > The repeated slippage of release dates, and recent discussions about
> > > 'must have' features for the next release, make me suspect that Fedora
> > > has no answers to the question, or at least none that are any better
> > > than Debian's. Fedora may not value democracy over the product, but it
> > > doesn't seem to have replaced democracy with anything that is decisively
> > > better for the product.
> >
> > My take on slipping release dates.  We *always* slip.  But then again,
> > almost all software projects do.
> >
> > This is because we start out by saying we want to try to do the release
> > every 6 months.  And that can guarantee that it happens in 7 or 8, because
> > the physical act of slipping the release causes some level of shame and
> > urgency.
> >
> > If we just said at the beginning 7 months, then I think we'd *still* end
> > up slipping, and it would really be 8 or 9 months.
>
> Saying that we always slip seems to be a self fulfilling prophesy for
> Fedora.
>

I think that this is correct. It is probably the one thing that I know
as true from the days of 4.2 and way before. You set the schedule, and
then you silently add the extra 2-3 weeks that you know you will need
because thats the way its always been. When I first got there the
developers were working hard on this or that.. but the word was 'well
we are just going to slip a bit.'.

It is always something.. glibc needs a tweak, wait a week and we will
ahve an X update, we almost made the KDE release date... etc etc.


.....

> If we really wanted to do time-base releases, the MustHaves page would
> just say:
>
> "Is it April 26th yet?"
>

... I feel an extremely strong feeling of dejavu here.


> and we'd work backwards from there.  Barring doing something that
> radical (which GNOME does, to somewhat mixed results), I bet we always
> slip a couple months, every release.
>
> Thanks,
> -Jonathan
>
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"




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