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