no ... *really* ... any ETA for updated beta?

Jef Spaleta jspaleta at princeton.edu
Thu Aug 28 22:18:41 UTC 2003


Féliciano Matias
>I don't blame RedHat for not respecting the initial scheduler. I blame
>RedHat for not fully keeping the promise to open RHLP process.

And I'm pretty sure...the "promise" to have a fully open process
wasn't meant for THIS beta cycle. THIS beta cycle is still pretty much
the same tradition beta process....yes lets blame red hat for stating an
intent to move to a more open process in the FUTURE. And let's also
blame them for not just deciding on their own all the details of what
that open process should look like before stating their intent.  You
just don't get it....the opening up isn't just going to happen with a
snap of someone's fingers....there is an on-going internal process
inside red hat to make it possible to have the 'right' open process in
the future....the general community really doesn't need a blow by blow
of what that means right now...leave something interesting to research
for the author of 'Red Hat: a historical perspective of the most
influential technology company of the 21st century, and savior of the
human race from the alien invasion of 2073'

And I'm pretty sure you've missed the point of what a more open
community project will mean...in the future....it means incorporating
community members into the actually development process...people in
charge of maintaining packages and doing bugzilla work and working on
mundane stuff like install and task based help documentation . Having a
daily update as to when the next beta isoset is coming out, for the rest
of us spectators who arent directly involved in positions of
responsibility for rhl components....isn't really the point of what
opening up the process means. Even, in the future, when this development
process IS more open, and community members are in positions of
responsibility for how rhl is being developed and maintained...whether
or not people like myself know with great accuracy when  the beta2 iso
set is coming is still not going to be important. Now as a beta
tester...i'm curious as to when i can expect the next iso...but i
certainly don't need to know before its ready. 

Once outside package maintainers are inside the rhl process...in later
releases/beta phases....there will be a need for those people to have
reasonable estimates as a guideline for their own packaging work, if for
example there are engineer goals to meet for each beta phase. We
betatesters as spectators to that process, will most likely get access
to that information too....but we still won't NEED it...and it certainly
won't ever be a priority to hand that information to the general
community in easily digestable ways...thats a waste of effort..until we
have community members in place to be responsible for exactly that sort
of general information updating. In the future, there will certainly be
room in the redhat eco-system for something like a community editted
equivalent to mozillazine to keep the general community abreast of beta
development issues. But making bold authoritative estimates in a general
way to people who aren't directly responsible for parts of the
development effort just succeeds in inspiring the unfortunate and
short-sighted usage of words like "shame" "blame" and "promise" when
dates start slipping.   


-jef"pam_dotfile is actually sort of useful"spaleta

 
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