Fedora Release Engineering Meeting Recap - 2009-05-04

[John Poelstra]

Jesse Keating said the following on 05/06/2009 08:56 AM Pacific Time:
> On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 05:45 -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
>> Reading the IRC log am I correct in understanding that a more detailed
>> summary is:
>>   "Remove all alpha release tasks from the schedule.
>>    There will be no alpha release because it does not
>>    provide enough value for the effort required to create
>>    it.  There is little public testing value from it
>>    either."
>> ?
> 
> Not fully known yet.  Basically because 12 is such a short cycle, I was
> looking for ways to maximize uninterrupted development time.  The best

The overall Fedora 12 schedule with a GA date of 2009-11-03 is 21 days 
shorter than Fedora 11 and exactly the same length as Fedora 8 so it is 
not unusually short.

> way I could do that was to drop the Alpha cycle.  While already a
> non-blocking freeze, it still drew too much attention away from ongoing
> development in order to deliver something that was weeks old and already
> irrelevant.  The alpha has had dubious quality to the development cycle,
> at least from the developer and tester POV.  About the only thing of
> quality it provided was a "known good starting point" for which to
> install and then update to rawhide, and even that hasn't been true for
> large swaths of folks in recent releases.

I'd be curious to see our torrent and download numbers for the F11 Alpha 
to understand how insignificant it was.  Where can we find them?

Although it is simple to just "not do the Alpha" it will take more 
coordination across the other Fedora teams AND good messaging in the 
press and wider world that no alpha is coming for Fedora 12 along with 
the reasons why. Have we considered the cost of this trade-off to our 
brand and community?

>> 1) What dates are we proposing for releasing "development snapshots"
>> before the beta?  We should put these on the schedule now.
> 
> I honestly hadn't planned on doing regular snapshots during this period.
> Instead I was hoping for some test-days to drive the need for live
> images and/or full media images for a particular test target.  For
> people looking for a good "jumping off" point, they can install the GA
> of F11 and yum update to rawhide.

No snapshots at all or just not before Beta?  Here was the original 
draft which I can change to reflect the "no alpha" scenario if it goes 
forward:
http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-12/f-12-releng-tasks.html

If we plan to push out final freeze and corresponding GA by one week are 
  we proposing to start the beta a week later too? Or have one week 
longer between public beta release and final freeze?

Thanks,
John