RCs for Everyone (was One (more) week slip of Fedora 11 Release)

[John Poelstra]

Jesse Keating said the following on 05/28/2009 11:07 AM Pacific Time:
> On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 20:54 +0300, cornel panceac wrote:
>> it would be very nice to announce the release candidates when they become
>> available.
>>
>
> We can't broadly announce them, as the RCs are not mirrored and piling
> more people into trying to get access to the RCs would just make it that
> much slower for the key people to get them in the first place.  If we
> went to a mode where we could only do one RC a week and it was mirrored
> and we had something like 3 months to get through RC phase that might
> work, but I doubt our developers would appreciate that.
>
>

I realize this has been the party line for a long time and I've also 
been told that many Fedora decisions cannot be measured and that we "go 
with our gut." ;-)

My gut keeps telling me that given all the smart, innovative people we 
have that we should be able to fix this issue.  In most areas of Fedora 
we place a heavy emphasis on making things accessible to everyone 
instead of just the "key people", particularly when it comes to content 
that can be tested.

We've gone down the road before of saying rawhide is equal to the RC, 
but we've also found that not to be the case and it hurt us. 
Additionally, if we go with with what is being proposed here:
 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_Fedora_Development_Cycle_2009
won't we be another step removed from being able to use rawhide this way 
for Fedora 12?

If our current process isn't working to involve everyone in testing the 
most important bits (RC), why can't we explore more ways to fix it or 
have a FAD for it?  Ideas like:
1) Changing the structure of our release schedule and test releases so 
RCs can get broad testing?
2) Changing the amount of last minute package changes?
3) Spending part of the FAD (scheduled above) for brainstorming ways to 
explore this issue?
4) Not being so concerned about "holding up the developers"
   --developers are an extremely important part of our releases because 
without them there wouldn't be any content to release :)  No, I'm not 
advocating doing RCs for three months (one week might be a great place 
to start), but I think other parts of the Fedora community, including 
our end users should be considered too.
5) Define "What is Fedora" and who our target audience is so we can 
address #4 in a proper way (I realize the Board owns this and started 
discussing it in January).  If it turns out that our releases are all 
for developers then not holding up developers will be a key concern :)

I think it is more accurate to say that fixing the issue of making the 
RCs available to everyone is not a priority versus saying we can't.

John