Fedora 11 schedule proposal

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 16:11 -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> Fedora releases typically have a 6 month development cycle.  We target
>> specific dates for the release to give developers, end users, and
>> upstreams a target to shoot for.  Typically any slipping of a release we
>> do, we just shorten the next release to make up for it.  However a
>> month's time is quite a lot to shrink.  Especially because of the
>> significance of F11.
>
> FWIW, the past slippage of a month that we had, we made up the month
> over the course of 2 release cycles to help reduce the impact to each
> individual release.
>
>> Fedora 11 will be extremely important to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
>> (otherwise known as RHEL).  RHEL 6 planning has looked to use Fedora 10
>> and Fedora 11 as releases to work out new technologies and features that
>> are desired in RHEL 6.  This includes a lot of upstream work that is
>> being done, and targeted to land in these two releases.  That planning
>> was also planning for a full 6 month Fedora 11 cycle, and Red Hat
>> resources were lined up to take advantage of this, by participating more
>> in the development cycle, in the testing cycle, in bugfixing, etc...
>> This is a good thing.
>>
>> However, if we were to take a month out of Fedora 11s schedule to hit
>> that May 1 date, we would shorten the amount of time we get the RH
>> attention, and we shorten the amount of time we give our developers to
>> land the pre-planned features.  This is not a good thing.  These are not
>> just RH developers for RH features either, it's all developers for all
>> features.
>
> So, I don't fully buy this reasoning.  As you said above, we target
> consistent dates for each release.  This is to help developers (upstream
> and downstream) know when they need to target having things done.  And
> given that we try to do most of the work we have in Fedora in upstream
> projects as opposed to in a Fedora silo, a slippage of a Fedora release
> fundamentally doesn't change when things would need to be upstream.  So
> I don't see how the fact that we slipped our release due to
> infrastructure problems shortens the amount of time developers have.
> They had until May 1st before, they still have until May 1st (well,
> before that due to freezes; but you get the idea :)

I agree with Jeremy on this one. In the past, pushing out target dates
usually cause more conflicts with other schedules than it helps.




-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"