Fedora 15 Schedule

[John Poelstra]

Disclaimer: I'm pursuing this issue because Jesse told me the kernel 
team wanted to be better integrated into the Fedora development 
schedule.  I'm getting the impression, however, that may not be want you 
want.  To be clear, I'm not trying to force a schedule on the kernel 
team.  Instead I want to help create something that will useful to 
Fedora and to you.  If neither of these objectives can be met, then my 
work here is done. :)  If there is a better way to approach and go it, 
please let me know.

Dave Jones said the following on 11/29/2010 12:10 PM Pacific Time:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 11:54:37AM -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
>
>   >  This is good information about which version you think Fedora will use,
>   >  however it doesn't really help build a Fedora schedule for the kernel team.
>   >  What specific tasks do you want inserted into the schedule?
>   >
>   >  For example:
>   >  1) On which date do you want to decide on the upstream kernel version
>   >  for Fedora 15?
>
> As upstream doesn't do guaranteed release dates, we can't really be any
> more concrete than the hand-wavy guesses that Kyle mentioned.
>
> So we can say "F15 is going to be 2.6.38" now, and that's about as
> best a guess we can do. .39 is going to be way after GA, and .37
> will be 'stale' by the time GA occurs.   The exact timing of .38 however
> is tied to factors we don't control.  Guessing the release date is
> pretty pointless.
>

I am not suggesting or saying we guess at an upstream kernel version or 
that we can guarantee an upstream release date.  I am asking, when 
during the Fedora release process, does *Fedora* decide which upstream 
version of the kernel it wants to include in it's upcoming release.  In 
other words, at what point in the Fedora release cycle do we stop taking 
the "latest from upstream" and lock onto a version that Fedora will GA 
with?

>   >  2) How many days before the creation of the RC for Alpha, Beta, and
>   >  Final should the latest kernel be packaged for Fedora?
>
> historically, we've just kept building new candidates for as long
> as we have release critical bugs.  I think that criteria is more useful
> to meet than a date.  There's always 'one more bug' of course, but
> the acceptance criteria for blockers near the end is pretty tight.
>

In Fedora 14, Dave Lehman from the anaconda team requested specific 
dates to reminded that a new installer build was needed, typically a few 
days before important composes.  Would a similar reminder for the kernel 
be helpful to make sure that important patches get testing coverage or 
address blocker bugs?

>   >  3) What dates and tasks are important to the kernel team to remember AND
>   >  complete in order to have a smooth Alpha, Beta, and Final release cycle?
>   >
>   >  4) What are important tasks that have been overlooked in the past that
>   >  if tracked (and set to your list as a reminder) would have helped the
>   >  kernel to play nicer with the rest of the Fedora release cycle?
>
> Disabling debug-by-default is the only real date-driven thing we do.
> Everything else is driven either by upstream release schedules, or
> by the QA team deciding if something is blocker worthy or not.
>

Which date should that happen on?

John