[sugar] Feature freeze for 0.84

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Luke Faraone <luke at laptop.org> wrote:
> I've been working on packaging Sugar for Ubuntu, and have looked forward to
> what will be Sugar (and Ubuntu )'s next release cycle.
>
> Per http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap , it seems that the first
> release candidate of Sugar will be out on Feb. 13th. Afterward, I take it
> there will only be bugfixes until the final?
>
> This is important from a packaging point of view, because Ubuntu's roadmap
> is very closely aligned with Sugar's, our feature freeze (after which
> non-bugfixes will require an exception, which takes a while to apply for)
> will be around the 18th of February.

I can't speak for Sugar, but, while OLPC has informally named a March
release date for 9.1 (where by informally I mean, "I've argued
strongly for this"), I don't know that we've committed firmly to such
a date yet.  Our original goal was to synchronize with Fedora's
release schedule, but Fedora's release schedule has been thrown into
some disarray recently, and I don't think a concrete plan for F11's
release will occur before F10 is released (on 2008-11-25).  Since OLPC
is based on Fedora, it may make sense to sync up with F11.  On the
other hand, F10 slipped 2 months; OLPC might decide that we don't want
to slip that much just to match up.

I expect that a concrete schedule will be hammered out during the Nov
17 joint OLPC 9.1/Sugarlabs 0.84 planning meeting.  I hope that OLPC's
schedule will not drift much from Sugarlab's, because it is
counterproductive for sugarlabs to be freezing while OLPC is adding
features, or vice-versa.

We should certainly keep the Ubuntu (and Debian, and Fedora) release
schedules in mind when we pick dates.  If OLPC's 9.1 release is
planned for March, I expect that Sugarlab's freeze schedule will be
consistent with Ubuntu's freeze (and, by extension, that OLPC will
base 9.1 on Fedora 10 and not try to sync up with F11 in this cycle).

But it is possible that we will opt for a later freeze, or that actual
development status will cause a slip.  In that case I expect that
shipping the latest OLPC 8.2.x point release (sugarlabs 0.82.x)
available at that time in Ubuntu would be best.  Informally, we expect
that there might be an 8.2.x point release in December or so, which
matches up well with school schedules in the Southern Hemisphere.

Finally, a proper decision would also need to take into account
post-release update mechanisms in the various releases.  In the Fedora
world, it is fairly easy to push an updated sugar into the 'updates'
channel for the latest stable release.  In the debian world, people
expect 'stable' to be more-or-less out-of-date, and 'testing' is a
reasonable way for people to get the absolute latest sugar if they
need it.  I don't know exactly what Ubuntu's post-release update
policy is, but it might best *not* to try to chase/push the bleeding
edge, but take whatever the latest *released* sugar is as of your
freeze date, so that your "bugfixes" can be for Ubuntu bugs only, and
you're not trying to follow the bleeding edge of sugar
development/bugfixing at the same time Ubuntu is trying to stabilize.
 --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )