Request for Comments: Proposed changes to Fedora development cycle

[John Poelstra]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 07:55:28 +0200
> Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
> 
>>>  We have to stop changes in order to finalize
>>> the release and get it out the door.  
>> A week IMHO should suffice. If it doesn't I'd say we need more point
>> in the middle to bring rawhide at least in a better shape beforehand.
> 
> I think you severely understimate the amount of time it takes to
> compose trees, including all the Live images, validate that the compose
> itself went fine, final check that all the test cases still work, move
> the bits around to stage for mirrors, get mirrors populated, send gold
> bits off to pressers to produce media to use at events, finalize
> release notes web content, etc, etc, etc...  A week is a severely short
> amount of time to accomplish all of this.
> 

Which is a good argument for why having a "schedule" of tasks with durations would be more informative then a simple list of "milestones" we call a schedule :) 

A list of sub-tasks for "release staging" and how long they take helps people to understand how the release work better and as things get bigger and more complicated manage--reminds of what needs to get done.  

I've been tracking our schedules in TaskJuggler and would like to put it into more active use for F9.

Here are time based schedules with the proposed schedule vs. actual.  Note I've inferred the durations because so far we haven't defined them.  They can easily be blown out to be more detailed or to include other groups (documentation, infrastructure, etc.).

F8: http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f8/f8-tasks-overview.html

Tracking what Jesse created for 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ReleaseEngineering/DevelopmentChangesProposal

I created a proposed time based schedule F9: http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f9/f9-tasks-overview.html

Source file is here if you'd like to propose a patch to the schedule:
http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f9/f-9-new-devel.tjp

All schedules: http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/

John