Wild and crazy times for the development tree

[Stephen J. Smoogen]

On 3/20/06, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-20 at 21:40 +0100, David Nielsen wrote:
> > man, 20 03 2006 kl. 19:45 +0100, skrev Arjan van de Ven:
> > > personally I think the current 9 month schedule wasn't too bad (ok the
> > > end slipped too much but lets ignore that bit); it gives enough time to
> > > do fundamental improvements. For fc6 it would be nice if boot speed was
> > > further improved for example, and since initscripts are tricky and need
> > > lots of testing... a bit of extra time would be neat
> >
> > 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.
>
> Realistically, I don't think the 9 month cycle really helped that much
> except for one very specific case of the underlying installer changes.
> And realistically, if it had been a six month cycle instead, those would

The problem with 6 month release cycles is developer burn-out. You had
3 extra months of fluff time that I saw lots of developers come in and
out and up-to-speed, and time for some developers to hand other stuff
off. In the previous release cycles.. I saw more people just bail out
after their 2nd release because they just didnt have any energy left
to devote and there was no time to do so. You can only push people
along a marathon schedule for so long before they break..

If you go back to a 6 month schedule, you will need to pair back how
many CD's are in the core set by at least 2 or 3 cd's. That would give
developers 6 weeks of fluff time to regain their energy after a
release and then be able to come back and say "you know this brick
wall we keep hitting on this project? Did you know there was a door 2
feet down?"

> have been worked out then as well.  For everything else, if we had been
> on a six month cycle, some of them would have made FC5 and some would
> have made FC6.  But guess what, that's going to be true no matter _when_
> you actually cut a release.  It's the price of doing releases more than
> once every three years :-)
>
> Jeremy
>
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--
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator