Fedora Release Engineering Meeting Recap 2008-11-24

[John Poelstra]

Recap and full IRC transcript found here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ReleaseEngineering/Meetings/2008-nov-24

Please make corrections and clarifications to the wiki page.

== Fedora 10 ==
* In good shape for release of Fedora 10 tomorrow
* Fedora 10 zero day updates are ready to go
* f13: one thing I was toying with is when we branch and freeze, making 
the development/ path continue on with say F12 content, and start 
publishing the F11 content to releases/11/Everything/

== Fedora 11 Schedule ==
* need to make sure F12 branching is visible
* finding ways to reduce package churn
* QA team monitoring status of features during release
* proposal at 
http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-11/f-11-standard.html
* poelcat to make adjustments to proposed schedule and republish
*# move alpha freeze forward one week
*# move alpha release forward one week
*# remove critical package freeze from schedule
*# offset feature freeze and beta freeze by one week
* vote on schedule to present to FESCo next week

== IRC Transcript ==

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 25.11.2008 21:17, John Poelstra wrote:
>  [...]
>  * f13: one thing I was toying with is when we branch and freeze, making 
>  the development/ path continue on with say F12 content, and start 
>  publishing the F11 content to releases/11/Everything/ 
Not the first time that idea comes up -- but I really think something 
like that is way overdue, as getting most of our development to a halt 
for 28 days seems bad as that together with the other freezes beforehand 
is more than 1/6 of the time a development cycle has.

So +1 to this.

CU
knurd

[Jesse Keating]

On Wed, 2008-11-26 at 06:53 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>  On 25.11.2008 21:17, John Poelstra wrote:
>   > [...]
>  > * f13: one thing I was toying with is when we branch and freeze, making 
>  > the development/ path continue on with say F12 content, and start 
>  > publishing the F11 content to releases/11/Everything/
>  
>  Not the first time that idea comes up -- but I really think something 
>  like that is way overdue, as getting most of our development to a halt 
>  for 28 days seems bad as that together with the other freezes beforehand 
>  is more than 1/6 of the time a development cycle has.
>  
>  So +1 to this.
>  
>  CU
>  knurd
>   
My continued main concern with this though is fracturing the testing
pool, and not capturing enough eyes/minds on the frozen content for the
release.  The sad fact of many releases is that many people seem to not
start looking at overall polish and bugfixing until the final freeze is
hit.  They treat the final freeze as the last development day and expect
to have time after that to do bugfixing.  Combining that with taking
users away from the QA on those frozen bits could lead to an even worse
release.  So I think there are two problems to solve there.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 08:33:21 -0800,
  Jesse Keating <jkeating(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  
>  My continued main concern with this though is fracturing the testing
>  pool, and not capturing enough eyes/minds on the frozen content for the
>  release.  The sad fact of many releases is that many people seem to not
>  start looking at overall polish and bugfixing until the final freeze is
>  hit.  They treat the final freeze as the last development day and expect
>  to have time after that to do bugfixing.  Combining that with taking
>  users away from the QA on those frozen bits could lead to an even worse
>  release.  So I think there are two problems to solve there. 
I didn't find continual testing of the frozen bits all that useful. I wanted
to continue tracking F10 bugfixes especially xorg-x11-drv-ati and kernel
fixes since Dave Airlie was trying really hard to get KMS in shape for the
release and rapid feedback seemed help.

So I think there are three tracks that should be under consideration, not just
two. One is tracking the release, another release plus potential zero day
updates and the last the next rawhide.