Suggested Freeze Policy change for Fedora 22+

[Kevin Kofler]

Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> These new rules don't ban "preventing a slip", they attempt to eliminate
> the unreasonable demands we're putting on our volunteer QA team *every
> week during Freeze*. It's gotten out of hand and it's burning people
> out.
> 
> The primary problem is that when we slip, there has never been a clear
> statement made about when exactly when the deadline is for devs to get
> their fixes in. Historically, devs have been operating under the
> assumption that as long as a package lands before the next Go/No-Go
> meeting, but that has failed to account for the time needed to create a
> new Test Compose (which takes approx. 8 hours right now) as well as time
> to have the QA team re-run the Release Validation tests (which takes an
> absolute minimum of 20 hours fueled by caffeine and adrenaline). This
> constant pause-then-panic situation is untenable and needs to be
> addressed.
> 
> By instituting the above plan, we will be much more transparent about
> what the deadlines are for all participants (dev/maintainers, rel-eng
> and QA) and we relieve the latter two of some of their panicked efforts
> if we get to the Monday Blocker Review and it's clear that there is no
> realistic chance that the Thursday Go/No-Go will rule in favor.

I think our fundamental disagreement is that you believe that the rules will 
make developers come up with fixes faster, whereas I believe that we 
developers are already fixing things as fast as we can and the rules will 
only make Fedora releases slip more often.

        Kevin Kofler