including gnome 2.4 in next red hat release

[Havoc Pennington]

On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 02:06:05PM -0400, Gerald Henriksen wrote: 
> On 04 Aug 2003 16:29:23 +0200, you wrote:
> 
> >We are quite aware of Gnome 2.3, given that several of us are
> >maintainers of core Gnome modules. This also means we are aware of the
> >schedules involved. However, Red Hat Linux is on a time-based schedule,
> >and it was clear long ago that Gnome 2.4 would be released too late to
> >be in the current release.
> 
> Well, Gnome 2.4 is basically in feature freeze with beta testing
> occurring.  I guess the question is whether it would cause to many
> problems having the Red Hat and Gnome beta testing occur at the same
> time by including the Gnome beta in the Red Hat beta.

It makes some sense, but would mean possibly delaying the Red Hat
release a bit. Historically this was impossible because the gold date
had to be planned months in advance to get all the physical aspects of
the box set and distribution lined up.

It's conceivably possible now but we have to remember that there are
many pieces of software in the release and if we're always delaying
for something we'll end up with 5 years between releases.

> >Luckily, both Gnome and Red Hat are using a time-based schedule with a
> >pretty fast turnaround (both about 6 months). This means that even if
> >the schedule of the two projects will not always be synchronized it will
> >never take that long before the latest Gnome release will get into a Red
> >Hat release.
> 
> Or more accurately, that there will always be a needless 6 month delay
> between Gnome being released and then being included in Red Hat.

6 months *worst case* delay, *if* both GNOME and Red Hat stick to
time-based releases. If either GNOME or Red Hat starts delaying for
specific features - such as "the latest GNOME version" - the worst
case for missing any specific feature becomes much worse. Suddenly
it's possible to have needless 2 year delays.

So time-based releases can mean missing a specific feature, but avoid
worst-case behavior.

Delays from 0 to 6 months between GNOME and Red Hat release are
equally likely, 6 months is not any more likely than anything
else. From a Red Hat standpoint, I think the ideal delay would
actually be about 2 months, which gives us time to package and
integrate.

So with GNOME and Red Hat both doing time-based releases the average
delay should be 3 months, not that far off from ideal.

Still, we may want to consider tweaking the schedule a couple weeks to
get 2.4 in. My main worry is just having people available to actually
do the packaging work in the next few weeks, which I'm not sure we
have.

Havoc