[Techteam] Making updating easier and Planning for Support

[Martin Langhoff]

Hi Kim -

On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Kim Quirk <kim at laptop.org> wrote:
> Secondly, I am proposing that our Support team can only support one
> major release along with the current one. With school systems being
> run on yearly basis, this would suggest that we plan for 2 major
> releases per year. That would give schools a chance to use either the
> fall or spring release as their base; and then plan to upgrade between
> school years to the next release.

Overall, I think your analysis and plan are spot on. In my experience,
unfortunately, it seems that educational institutions - specially at
the country level - are fairly slow moving. In your plan the
expectation is that all the regions in a given hemisphere are in
lockstep with us on the yearly upgrade cycle. I suspect that it will
be rather hard for them to achieve.

Perhaps we just declare them "unsupported" and move on - I am not sure
how this will work. My recommendation is to have _one_ major release
per year for countries. Damn slow, I know -

> We had been talking about as many as 3 or 4 major releases per year...

I do think we'll want to have feature releases that build up to the
major "supported" release. Those are for our developers / testers /
pilot communities, and they are just not supported long term (not
formally at least).

> so this is a good point of discussion and something I'd like to
> finalize in the next few weeks.  Perhaps the minor/patch releases can
> allow small features so developers don't feel like they have only two
> times/year to get in a new feature. We have to think about what that
> means for testing and support. We also have to keep in mind that our
> audience is schools, teachers and students, not developers.

The developers and tinkerers audience will bring bug reports and
continued development, which leads to stability - so we can keep
things going.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
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