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

[Jesse Keating]

On Wed, 2009-09-30 at 19:00 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 
> So "clearly" that many feature owners are confused about what they mean?

A few feature owners missed the repeated messages.  I'm sorry, it was
bound to happen.  Change causes disruption, but often that disruption is
for the better good.

> 
> And don't forget that development snapshots are primarily for developers (in 
> fact many projects use "developER release" as synonymous to "developMENT 
> release"), so it's important that THEY are familiar with the terms.

And many of our developERs were not used to the milestone names we gave
our developMENT releases.  Also, our developMENT releases are for QA
testers as well, who were equally confused as to the meanings of our old
milestones.

> > Any change is going to cause some confusion with those who are used to the
> > previous state but to change t again would just be worse. In no time
> > you'll be used to the change and rail against any fruther change.
> 
> I don't think we've reached that point at all. I think justifying the change 
> post-facto as a one-time change for the shorter F12 cycle (even though that 
> wasn't the plan) and changing back to the tried and true terminology from 
> F11 for F13 would not leave many people confused.

This isn't a post-facto justification.  The only "one-off" for F12 was
the removal of the milestone previously known as alpha.  The rest of the
milestone adjustment proposal came out of the Fedora Activity day, had
lots of time to be communicated, discussed, and voted on by the
community at large, FESCo specifically.

> 
> And worst case, in the unlikely event people already got used to the terms 
> from F12, the worst that could happen after reverting to the previous terms 
> is that they would deliver F13 features one milestone TOO EARLY. That would 
> actually be a good thing. ;-)
> 
> So really, I see no practical argument against switching back to the 
> Alpha/Beta/Preview naming (and reintroducing the old Alpha – again, as 
> useless as it was in practice, the psychological impact on developers 
> shouldn't be underestimated).
> 
> 

I'm really not in favor of changing it again.  A group of developers,
release engineers, and QA folks brainstormed on fixing the milestone
issues and what we have now is the product of that effort.  If you
really think it wasn't for the eventual better, float your own proposal
and get approval from developers, release engineers, QA folks, and
eventually FESCo.

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