Buyer Beware: A Major Change in NFS is about to happen

[John Poelstra]

Kevin Kofler said the following on 10/01/2009 02:28 AM Pacific Time:
> So I'll have to blame the previous FESCo for voting this through with 
> practically no feedback, as they observed themselves before the vote:
> 17:14:04 <nirik> has there been any feedback on lists or wiki?
> 17:14:15 * nirik just sees one 'sounds fine to me' comment on the discussion 
> page
> 17:14:25 <notting> yeah, haven't seen much

The current FESCo might also want to consider taking more of a 
leadership role in monitoring the release processes, tracking the 
schedule, and evaluating the quality of the release under development 
and our ability to release on time.  As the group responsible for 
guiding the technical direction of our releases I think this is 
something they should be more involved in.  I'd be glad to help gather 
data they might need to do this and there might be others who would be 
willing to help too.

I'm suggesting more proactive leadership from FESCo and clear 
initiatives to take Fedora to the next level versus only being 
responsible for approving features, proven packagers, and policy matters.

This is also my vision for the Fedora Board.

> But in any case, I don't think any of us realized the amount of maintainer 
> confusion this would cause (I know I didn't or I would have complained on 
> the mailing list right when this was proposed). In hindsight, it was 
> definitely a mistake. This thread is just one of the examples of maintainers 
> having been led to believe they have more time to develop their features 
> than they actually do, I've seen several more while sitting in FESCo feature 
> meetings. We should fix the mistake at the first opportunity (Fedora 13).
> 

In other threads developers complained that the schedule was greatly 
shortened (not completely true either).

It is unreasonable to assume that before the change to "Alpha" and 
"Beta" for Fedora 12, that EVERYONE was clear what happened in "Alpha," 
"Beta," and "Preview" in the previous releases.  That has never been the 
case.

Labeling "Alpha," "Beta," and "Preview" were not evaluated based on 
their actual industry meanings but were relabeled from the original 
test1," "test2," and "test3," which were equally unclear.

At the same time, when the change for Fedora 12 was proposed it was 
based on a variety of experiences and reactions to our previous test 
phases and schedule changes for Fedora 12.  It lacked hard data and we 
still don't have any clear criteria to determine which way is better or 
measure the results.  So it is hard to argue that switching back would 
be any better, though my "gut" says it would... I know other "guts" will 
disagree ;-)

We need some guiding criteria or we're just going to keep going around 
in circles.  This is one reason I believe defining our target audience 
and defining what we want to create and be (separate board thread on 
fedora-advisory-board list) matters a great deal.

John