Fedora Release Engineering Meeting Recap - 2009-05-04

[Bill Nottingham]

John Poelstra (poelstra at redhat.com) said: 
>>     * the alpha milestone was removed entirely
>
> Reading the IRC log am I correct in understanding that a more detailed
> summary is:
>  "Remove all alpha release tasks from the schedule.
>   There will be no alpha release because it does not
>   provide enough value for the effort required to create
>   it.  There is little public testing value from it
>   either."
> ?
>
> 1) What dates are we proposing for releasing "development snapshots"
> before the beta?  We should put these on the schedule now.

Not yet determined.

(Skipping over marketing)

> 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.

Is there no way for these to be started without a milestone?

> 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.

Maybe 'beta 1' and 'beta 2'. Given that we're feature frozen, calling
the first milestone 'alpha' seems odd; similarly, given the tree is frozen,
calling the second one 'beta' doesn't quite fit.

Bill