F9 Feature Process
Christopher Aillon
caillon at redhat.com
Wed Nov 7 14:38:14 UTC 2007
John Poelstra wrote:
> 4) How do we (realistically) encourage people to keep their feature
> pages up to date? It was a pain to keep hounding people to keep the
> status of their pages up to date--very few people kept them updated
> every 2 weeks. Considering how short our release cycle is I don't think
> we can go much longer than that.
Before we ask this question, first ask what do we gain vs. lose from
people updating the page every two weeks? Do we gain anything? Not
much, really. We get a false sense of security that it will get done on
time or it won't get done on time. A feature can get lots of work early
on and then the maintainer(s) go AWOL and leave it at 70%. Or there can
be no updates for a long while as they are doing other things and then
it gets done within the final two weeks before freeze.
And we lose engineering time from having to update the page. For some
of our contributors who are not paid to work on Fedora, this could be a
non-insignificant portion of the time they can allot to Fedora.
Is it really worth getting people to update their feature page every two
weeks? I'd argue it's much better to start looking for updates in the
week or two prior to the freeze as those will be more meaningful. We
should also encourage people to update their page regularly (or when
their feature is completed), but I'm not convinced that enforcing this
is a good idea.
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