To freeze, or not to freeze

[Jon Ciesla]

> On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 10:27 -0500, Jon Ciesla wrote:
>> > 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.
>
> slipping the release a week gets complicated as we get dangerously close
> to thanksgiving in the US which takes a huge number of contributors out
> of the world.

Are you suggesting that after a large meal containing high quantities of
starch, tryptophan, and alcohol, I might not be at my best?

For shame. ;)

> -sv
>
>


-- 
novus ordo absurdum