Fedora Release Engineering Meeting Recap - 2009-05-04

[Jack Aboutboul]

John Poelstra wrote:
> 1) What dates are we proposing for releasing "development snapshots"
> before the beta?  We should put these on the schedule now.

Okay so this confused me a bit and I'm not so sure what this means.  
Does this mean that we eliminate the "alpha" entirely with the current 
"beta" becoming the new alpha and then the preview release being "beta" 
with  development snapshots in the middle?
>
> 2) The alpha release has always been a good first opportunity to start
> marketing our next release, sending out press releases, etc. Basically,
> drawing attention to the fact with the general public that a new
> release is in the works.  Without an Alpha the first general press
> releases would be a month later.  Is this okay?
The idea of not tying it to an Alpha is fine, so long as we have some 
anchor point or date.  Right now, the marketing stuff, with the new 
schedule does tie to a time period +/- the date is each part of the 
release.  If there is something significant which is going to replace 
alpha we can use that or arbitrarily we can always use some other fixed 
point in the schedule as an anchor.
> The Alpha also naturally gets the release notes process and other parts
> of Fedora going (not development focused tasks) early which is a good
> thing.  We'd be losing that too.
Yup. We would need to define that kickoff by some other milestone.  Now 
that I think about it, we could have a day we call Kickoff day or 
Countdown day when all this commences.  I don't know if it will be as 
effective because I tend to think that the psychological milestone of an 
impending alpha release gets the ball rolling more quickly but thats 
just speculation.
>
> 3) If we do away with Alpha as we know it, leaving two test releases,
> can we simply call them "Alpha" and "Beta"? I've always thought "Preview
> Release" was a funny name for a test release and I think the terms
> "Alpha" and "Beta" are more familiar to the general public.

Again, so we switch the current "Beta" to "Alpha" and "Preview" to 
"Beta" right?  It could still work from the marketing perspective as I 
stated above, we just need to make sure all the features that are being 
worked on are solidified a decent amount of time before whatever the 
first release in the cycle is so that we can have stuff available for then.

Jack

P.S. Was the art team informed about this because I would tend to think 
this would affect them as well?