Wild and crazy times for the development tree

[David Nielsen]

man, 20 03 2006 kl. 16:28 -0500, skrev Matthew Miller:
> On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 09:40:10PM +0100, David Nielsen wrote:
> > I tend to agree, the 9 month cycle worked wonderfully, Fedora Core 5 is
> > by far the best release the Fedora Project has put out yet and as a
> > tester I enjoyed having that extra time to see new fundamental changes
> > take place and get bugs tracked down.
> 
> I was intrigued by your blog suggestion of alternating 9 month devel / 4
> month stabilization cycles. <tp://lovesunix.net/blog/?p=62> But I also think
> your own objection (people will not take the 9-month release seriously
> enough) is pretty strong.
> 
> As someone crazy enough to try to use Fedora for real work, the 9 month
> cycle is awesome.

I'd wager that the technology preview releases would actually get a fair
bit of attention if we continued the current agenda where large parts of
software is backported to the stable releases.

To sum up the point, we'd have 6 months of development time followed by
3 months of API stable bugfixing and updating (e.g. like what was done
with GNOME 2.14 in FC5) then we release that as the technology preview
Fedora, it would be considered stable. Then we follow that up with a 4
month API stable polish cycle.

Pros and cons of such an out of balance approach to releasing are many
but when I thought it up I had just had a lenghty conversation with one
of the FC developers who was telling me that with the 9 month cycle he
was fighting fatigue and burnout. It struck me as a user that the 9
month cycle was completely awesome but for developers it might be hard -
thus the need for faster paced releases and periods of light pressure.

We can all agree that major surgery like replacing the Init system,
reworking the installer, switching to modular X, switching GCC versions,
etc. requires more time than a 6 month cycle would allow for in terms of
testing (implementation I'm sure could be done in the 6 month cycle but
would it be well tested?). So we will need more cycles of this length,
depending on the amount of surgery that is planned in the near future. 

We also need to consider that Red Hat needs to make money, they do this
selling RHEL and services related to that product, this means they need
a stable product to base their work off. The polish cycle would, I hope,
serve well as a platform for this kind of work. I'm all for making Red
Hat' life easier, they kindly sponsor a lot of Fedora development that I
get with no strings attached - the least I can do for them is help
hammer Fedora as best I can.

I truly think that the 9/4 cycle could work well for us provided we
could build up an active testing community, it all depends on appealing
to people with QA experience or the will to learn these skills. If we
fail to do this having a polish cycle will not result in a massively
better product in the end - but then again if we don't have proper
testing of any cycle, Fedora will be shit regardless.

Is it time for me to lay down the crackpipe?

- David