To freeze, or not to freeze

[Jesse Keating]

A few weeks back the releng team made a schedule adjustment, to make up
for lost rawhide time due to the intrusion.  When we made that schedule
adjustment, we had assumed having a working rawhide within days of that
meeting, giving us a week or so worth of working rawhide to shake out
any pre-beta bugs we wanted to.

Unfortunately, while we were able to /attempt/ rawhide creation as
scheduled, a series of software bugs and bad personnel timing has
prevented those attempts from producing usable rawhide images until
basically today (and today's are pretty shaky from what I hear).  This
is not so good, as without an installable rawhide, we don't get a good
idea as to how the installer is working, and we miss out on a lot of
'initial install' testing of software on people's systems.  We get a lot
of "I upgraded from foo" type testing, which definitely has it's value,
but I feel we're missing a pretty key part of the rawhide experience.

The Beta freeze is set for Tomorrow.  That means the content that would
show up in tomorrow's rawhide would also be the content we use as the
basis of Beta.  Any changes after that would have to be ran through the
releng/qa teams to be approved.

Given the "fun" we had with Alpha, I really feel that it would be
prudent to spend a few more unfrozen days with a hopefully continually
working rawhide installer so that we can do some of that last minute
testing of what's wrong before we freeze, and hopefully have a shorter
and more productive freeze period.  But this is just my opinion, and
thus I'm putting this out there for discussion.

Feature owners in particular, I'm interested in your opinions as to if
you need a few more days to see what shape your features are in before
we freeze.  Ideally the week before a freeze would have been a slow down
period, where large changes were avoided and bugfixing was focused on so
that the Beta was useful.  I feel like we didn't give you a chance to do
this and it'll still feel like crash landing planes on the carrier deck
when it come to features in Beta.

I'm interested in what the rest of you think as well, both package
owners and testers alike.  If you think our schedule time would be
better spent fixing and verifying things pre-freeze and adding an extra
week to the schedule, or just freeze as things are, and potentially slip
a week during the freeze to make everything usable for the Beta (or the
third option, things are fine as they are, just freeze and release as
scheduled and stop being so paranoid).

What say you?

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20080908/cedff1f5/attachment.sig>