Freeze for Test1 is in 2 weeks + 1 day

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 1/8/07, Patrice Dumas <pertusus at free.fr> wrote:
> Indeed, but it is better, in my opinion, to do that through education
> of packagers and collective control from those who cares, rather than
> through another set of rules.

Untarnished idealism is nice, and I applaud your identification of
packager education and collective negotiation of interests as central
issues in the growing contributor space.
But.... there are practical considerations concerning how release
engineering is done so we do this in a timely an orderly manner. There
absolutely needs to be brief periods of time when the tree is frozen
and gatekeepers are in place, to act as a safety valve against human
action that is out-of-sync with the freeze process.

To re-cast this in terms of brick-and-mortar issues, there is a very
common concept in industrial safety call "Lock-out/Tag-out." When
potentially hazardous equipment is undergoing service that impacts the
safe operation of other pieces of equipment, the whole chain of
equipment which is affected is locked and tagged so that normal
operation is absolutely not possible and people are aware as to why
the equipment is out of service by reading the tag.
You can have mountains of trust in the equipment operators , and you
can put them into meetings for hours and hours telling them not to
operate the equipment on a certain day...but if you don't lock it out
and physically prevent them from operating it... it will be a big
problem, a problem that's not worth the risk, even if your employees
feel slighted about not being trusted to that extent.

That is exactly what a build system freeze with a group of gatekeepers
is for a Fedora Release.. its a lock-out/tag-out process to make sure
things we don't accidentally break pieces of a larger system through
normal operation actions.  It's not personal... its sound management.
It doesn't matter if the actions are malicious or not, there doesn't
need to be malicious intent for a mistake. Its much easier in the long
run to train people to respect lock-out/tag-out when it needs to
happen than it is to try to find ways to avoid locking people out to
make people feel better about their personal control issues.

-jef"wtf am I doing, quoting integrated line safety management
concepts to code developers"spaleta