schedules and nomenclature

[Walter Bender]

The nomenclature of the recent announcement about software schedules
caused some confusion—in part because we changed the names of the
various target builds. To bring some clarity to the schedule, we are
yet again changing the names:

"Factory" will refer to builds that are installed during production
testing of new hardware at the factory.

"Ship" will refer to builds that are on production machines that leave
the factory.

"Update" will refer to updates to Ship builds that are performed after
they leave the factory—before the laptops are deployed.

"Future" will refer to features and bug fixes planned for future releases.

"Opportunity" will refer to features that are under discussion.

"Untriaged" will refer to features that have not been scheduled.

The past/current schedule is as follows:

2006-11-18   Factory.1 (Build 185; Firmware Q2B11)
2007-04-31   Factory.2 (Build 386; Firmware Q2C09)
2007-05-08   Factory.3 (Build 406; Firmware Q2C11)
2007-08-04   Factory.4 (Build 542; Firmware Q2C22)
2007-10-26   Factory.5 (Build 622; Firmware Q2D02)
2007-10-30   Ship.1 (Build 623; Firmware Q2D03)
2007-11-02   Feature freeze for Update.1
2007-12-01   Update.1 (==Ship.2)

We expect to be doing updates monthly through the first quarter of
2008. After that, we will likely adopt a three-month update cycle.
Eventually we will adopt a six-month update cycle.

It should also be noted that we will be—when time permits—moving to a
build environment that enables individual activity developers to
maintain their own build cycles.

In regard to triage, tickets have recently been moved from the former
"1.0" milestone to "1.1", without leaving a trace in the individual
ticket's change logs. The motivation behind this unintentionally
heavy-handed move is to encourage developers to make a realistic
assessment of what they would complete by the Feature Freeze deadline.
Please tag tickets that you expect to close in time for Update.1 by
the end of the week with the keyword "Update.1?".

Finally, there are several pages in the wiki that may be of interest:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Update.1_process
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Ship.1_Software_Release_Notes
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Roadmap

Thank you for your continued support and feedback.

the OLPC team

---

FYI, previously:

Reload == Ship.1
V1.0 == Update.1
FSR == Update.1
XM-killjoy == Update.1
V1.1 == Update.2
Gen 2 == Future
Future Release == Future

-- 
Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org