Proposal: changing development cycle

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2012 14:21:42 +0100
Paolo Leoni <ulixes84 at yahoo.it> wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm a Fedora user and, occasionally, contributor.
> I'm writing to you only to expose a simple proposal on Fedora future.
> 
> We are debating on how Fedora Development cycle could be improved,
> and, at the same time, how to maintain its "bleeding edge" way.
> 
> So, this is my proposal:
> 
> We could introduce a periodically different Fedora development cycle,
> with major and minor release numbers.
> When we want release a new major version, we have a development cycle
> pretty longer, e.g. one year.
> For the minor release we have the old development cycle: 6 months.

The problem with this is that it's complex to communicate and our users
might not have clear expectations, IMHO. 

> The minor release that come before the major release could have a life
> cycle with a lenght of 18 months, to compensate the longer devel
> cycle of the next major release.

We could also be managing too many (more than we do now) branches. 

> The time to begin development of a major released could be discussed
> and decided by FESCo.

Sure, problem is that open source projects are pretty horrible about
planning. Ask most any open source project you are involved with: 

"Hey, whats your roadmap for the next 2 years?" and you will probibly
get "Oh, our next release in a month has foo and our release after that
(due out in 7 months or so) has bar planned"

It's just really hard in a fast moving industry to plan years ahead
easily. new things come up and you adjust for them all the time. ;) 

For that reason I think it might be difficult for Fedora to commit
upfront to a longer cycle/planning. 

kevin
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