Plan for tomorrow's (20070604) Release Engineering meeting

[Rahul Sundaram]

Josh Boyer wrote:

> For this release, it would have been particularly bad to release it
> before the mirrors had at least synced the new layout.  People would
> instinctively have done 'yum update' and had yum report that it couldn't
> find repodata from the mirrors.
> 
> (I know the RC release already had that problem but adding to it
> wouldn't have been good.)

Pup might give a more informative error or we could explain it better in 
a help button or something in general. This release indeed had the 
mirror layout change issue. This alone is not sufficient enough a reason 
to avoid doing torrent only initial releases in the future.

> There are other disadvantages.  Like the fact that release can't happen
> until the proper things are filed with the Export office.  Depending on
> when gold is declared and when it's filed, you might not be able to
> release anyway.

I believe that we can't even send to mirrors without export approval and 
there is always some leaked mirrors where users grab the images earlier. 
On some occasions they have downloaded the wrong release. We could ease 
it out a bit by providing them a early path so that the enthusiasts 
would get things without saturating the mirrors.

> We tried very hard to fix the upgrade paths to do this.  I'd like to see
> it possible.  We just need all package maintainers to be on the same
> page here.

I would go further and like rel eng to consider enforcing strongly a 
proper update path for all packages from all releases to future ones 
including test releases. I don't want to lump a lot but there is a 
number of related issues here. A policy on using Epoch's (there are 
differing opinions currently ranging from "it's just a number" to "it's 
the mother of all evil's") would be useful. Are you considering 
disabling ACL's by default on all packages and letting package 
maintainer's explicitly request with proper reasons?  Is rel eng, all 
sponsors and QA team allowed to fix EVR issues when necessary?

Rahul