Defining high-level objectives for a release? Re: fedora 7 schedule (was Re: Fedora 7 planing)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi all!

No one replied to this mail, so I'll bite (albeit a bit late)

David Malcolm schrieb:
> On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 17:37 -0500, Max Spevack wrote: 
>> On Tue, 12 Dec 2006, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>>> January 02 is probably to hard to reach, so we should cut one cycle from 
>>> four to three weeks. Which one? test3 maybe?
>> We talked about this in the Board meeting this morning.
>> Here was the proposal we came up with (modified for a Tuesday release, not 
>> a Monday release), working backward:
>>[...]
> The reverse-chronological list above defines some dates for releases of
> things that might be called "deliverables".  These deliverables are
> currently all software trees.
> 
> Is it possible to add the high-level objectives for what a release might
> contain as the first deliverable?
> - integrate Core and Extras
>[...]
> - static analysis for the whole distro
> or whatever...  (currently the only thing I know of for F7 is the first
> one)
> [...]
> IMHO the only way we can get whole-distribution improvements rather than
> incremental changes here and there is to try to define and aim for them
> at the start of a development cycle.

I like the idea of setting clear goals/roadmaps with target dates for
certain features (even if they get delayed/and or even pushed back to
one release later if that's needed). I think that might help getting
some real improvements realized and the community integrated better --
we currently often do some improvements "here and there" (as you wrote
above) in Fedora, but there is no "big picture/goal" visible :-( (at
least I can't see one)

But it might be a bit late for F7 to really use this scheme. Only some
rough stuff should be put together IMHO, e.g. "integrate Core and Extras
by test2". Then let's start properly with F8:

First week of May -> lean back and look at F7; get some fresh air, look
at what worked good, what needs to be improved for the next round
Second week of May -> set some goals for F8/a new Fedora Summit -- work
out a release date, a roadmap with features that are planed to be
impelmented for test[123] and final (think like David mentioned in his
mail like  "integrate lobby-buddy [1] throughout the distro", "reduce
the bootup time", "attempt to fix system services" ....

Cu
thl