Release Notes Schedule

[John J. McDonough]

As I dug into John Poelstra's schedule in more detail, I noticed a few 
issues that I hadn't noticed in earlier reviews.  Specifically, very long 
times on some short tasks with short times on some more difficult tasks, and 
tasks out of order.

Since I don't have a really good feel for the guides, I put together what I 
thought was a more workable schedule for release notes only.  Eric was going 
to look at guides.  My strawman is at:

http://jjmcd.fedorapeople.org/F12RN2a.html

I fixed major milestones to the same dates that John had so hopefully we 
don't affect other teams.  However, I did put a couple of L10N tasks on the 
list since they are tied closely to us.  I have not, however, had any 
discussion with L10N as to whether these times make any sense at all to 
them.

John suggested we get together in a Gobby/Talk meeting to get this schedule 
into sync with his.  I think we need to get the guides schedule integrated 
with this and include a representative from L10N in that meeting.

Because of the new definition of alpha and beta, our schedule looks a lot 
different than earlier releases.  Specifically, since alpha should be 
"feature complete", we should have almost everything we need for release 
notes by alpha.  That means the bulk of our work is between alpha and beta. 
However, since Beta should include more or less complete release notes, L10N 
will need time to translate them.  That pushes Docs work forward some, 
meaning we will have a real scramble right around alpha, and L10N will have 
a pile of work just before beta.  The upside is that the work before GA 
should be a little less onerous, and there should be little left to 
translate.

If we can make our plan of a table for all changes and prose only for 
significant effort required to convert plus highlighting high-profile 
features, there should be a lot less prose to write (and translate) than 
previous releases.  We will, however, need some pretty aggressive wiki 
gardening to allow us to convert to XML quickly.

I would like everyone to take a really close look at this, and comment on it 
on this list.  I think I have the major tasks identified, but it is always 
good to have more input.

Thanks
--McD