To freeze, or not to freeze

[Jon Ciesla]

> 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?

Wait a bit, maybe slip the release a week if you have to.  Better slippage
than suckage, IMHO.  After the intrusion, I think users will understand.

> --
> Jesse Keating
> Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
> identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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novus ordo absurdum