Fedora release criteria completely revised

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 15:07 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> > During FUDCon, we've been working on revising the Fedora release criteria.
> > John Poelstra had already fleshed out a structure and much of the final
> > content, and we've been revising and tweaking it in conjunction with QA
> > (myself, Will Woods and James Laska), release engineering (Jesse Keating),
> > anaconda team (especially Denise Dumas and Peter Jones) and desktop team
> > (Christopher Aillon and Matthias Clasen, who provided suggestions at an
> > earlier stage).
> 
> So once again things get decided by a small group of people in an in-person 
> meeting and whoever didn't happen to be at the right place at the right time 
> only gets to know the final decision after the fact? :-(

Nope. This has been discussed for several weeks now. John Poelstra
posted the initial draft to test-list on November 20th, and asked for
feedback:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-November/msg00926.html

He posted a further request for feedback on December 2nd, with an
explicit explanation that we would be gathering to finish working on the
pages at FUDCon:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-December/msg00047.html

It was also brought up at each QA group meeting during this time.

All the feedback that was received in response to any of those requests
was considered for the page either before or at FUDCon.

This is not really about 'deciding things', it's about documenting an
existing process. Everything in the criteria is either based on the
existing QA acceptance test plan or has been requested by the anaconda
or desktop teams.

>  I've complained 
> many times about this lack of transparency and I'll continue to do so.

I don't think complaint is justified in this case. It was a perfectly
transparent process. There was a lot of opportunity to feed in. 

> Plus, why was the KDE SIG not invited? (We had at least 4 KDE SIG folks 
> present at FUDCon.) 

We had a pre-hackfest meeting for the whole FUDCon attendee list where
everyone who wanted to hack on something stood up and announced what
they would be hacking on. John Poelstra announced at that meeting that
we would be gathering to work on the release criteria. The KDE people
who were at FUDCon were at that meeting, so they were in a position to
know about the work. I was running around all day telling people what we
were working on, it wasn't a secret.

> Are you planning to ship Fedora 13 even if the KDE Live 
> image is broken?

That depends on whether you want us to or not. :) If a SIG has criteria
they want to add to the list, and they can commit to fulfilling those
criteria and be willing to take the responsibility of causing a release
to slip if they _don't_ fulfill them, we can certainly add those to the
lists. If KDE has minimum functional levels for the KDE spin that they
can commit to, please do send them to this thread and we'll look at
putting them in the criteria.

We intentionally didn't specifically address the issue of the relative
'importance' of spins in the criteria as it's a difficult topic and one
that's not really appropriate to decide in this place. The existing
criteria didn't address this either - they didn't say anything about
_any_ spin having to be not 'broken' before we ship - so there's no
change there.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net