On Mon, 2016-12-05 at 16:10 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
It was by design, though — for a while, when a schedule slipped, we
planned the next schedule as 6 or 7 months from the actual release.
This time, we tried to keep it to October even though the previous
release had slipped, resulting in the short schedule. I'm the person
who pushed for that (because of the value of calendar consistency),
and
I'm now saying it was a mistake.
I still think it's a good idea for Workstation. We really need to be
seen as the leading GNOME distro: that's what gets GNOME people using
Workstation and recommending that other people install it, then those
people recommend it... I think it's part of the story behind our recent
rise in popularity. Right now we are that leading GNOME distro because
we usually follow about 1-2 months behind a GNOME release. It's a huge
advantage over, say, Ubuntu, where people complain about needing PPAs
to get the latest software and upstream has already moved on to newer
versions half a year ago. Right now this is one of our biggest
strengths as a distro, and your proposal would throw that away. So
there is real serious risk of changing this.
Also, if we do one release per year, then I expect most of the Red Hat
developers who work on GNOME would start using some unstable copr to
get the latest GNOME; this means way fewer developers using and testing
the latest release, since it's too stale. (I dunno what I'd do myself,
stick around and use a GNOME copr, or try to go improve Tumbleweed...?)
I'm even concerned by schedule slippage into June; this is the time of
year that I see complaints that Fedora is too old, go install Arch. I'd
prefer that we always target early May and November releases for
Workstation. I know, the early May is hard for GCC, but GCC isn't our
user experience and I'm sure it can wait until the fall releases.
A tangential argument is this will hurt our reputation for being a
leading-edge distro. Ubuntu would have newer software than us for half
the year....
Michael