First Draft Development Process Proposal

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 6:01 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 5:07 AM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
>> and I formally request synchronizing our release schedule
>> with Fedora's.
>
> That would be good, how can we do it though? A short 8.3 in November
> this year to get in sync?

Fedora releases in November and May. We could plan to release in
late-November (just before Thanksgiving) and June.  To sync up, I
think a short 8.3 might be pushing it a bit; I'd suggest taking the 10
months between August and June and making two 5 month release cycles,
so that we release in January (9.1, based on F10) and June (9.2, based
on F11), and are then synced up for a regular November/June schedule.
That's just my first shot at a proposal, though: there might be better
ideas out there.

In particular, the Fedora's November release date was specifically
designed to avoid Thanksgiving and winter holidays in December.  I'm a
little concerned that (a) if we follow Fedora too closely it will be
too hard to have Fedora making final release changes at the same time
we are, but (b) if we lag too far then we'll be freezing at
Thanksgiving and releasing at Christmas, which seems... suboptimal.

As an alternative which avoids the Christmas trap, we could consider 3
releases a year, in June, October, and February.  The June and October
releases will be based on the Fedora May release, and the February
release will be based on the Fedora November release.  This gives us
one "tight integration" in June where we're using the very latest
Fedora bits, one "free pass" in October where we can worry about our
own features and not track Fedora, and a leisurely February release
with "plenty of time" to sync up with the changes Fedora's made since
November.

I think I slightly favor the regularity of the November/June schedule,
with the understanding that our November schedule will be tighter (and
with a sharper cliff on the other side) than the June schedule.  We
might be more aggressive about pruning unready features early for
November, for example.

Here's the historic data on Fedora release dates (note that the
November/May schedule started around F7).
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/HistoricalSchedules
 If we had ambitious release engineers, we could plan to roll up
joyride into Alpha, Beta, and Preview releases synchronized with
Fedora as well, but I'd prefer we demonstrate that we can get our
basic product out the door on schedule before worrying about other
possible end-user products we might provide.
 --scott
-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )