Lessons Learned

[Jonathan Blandford]

On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 15:36 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> > The repeated slippage of release dates, and recent discussions about 
> > 'must have' features for the next release, make me suspect that Fedora 
> > has no answers to the question, or at least none that are any better 
> > than Debian's. Fedora may not value democracy over the product, but it 
> > doesn't seem to have replaced democracy with anything that is decisively 
> > better for the product.
> 
> My take on slipping release dates.  We *always* slip.  But then again, 
> almost all software projects do.
> 
> This is because we start out by saying we want to try to do the release 
> every 6 months.  And that can guarantee that it happens in 7 or 8, because 
> the physical act of slipping the release causes some level of shame and 
> urgency.
> 
> If we just said at the beginning 7 months, then I think we'd *still* end 
> up slipping, and it would really be 8 or 9 months.

Saying that we always slip seems to be a self fulfilling prophesy for
Fedora.

The fact that we always slip leads to us slipping more, as people worry
about the next release.  If they don't know exactly when the next one is
and worry about it being delayed as well, they're much more inclined to
rush to put things in.  Thus, we get something like the MustHaves, which
has two laudable but ambitious goals in it, and us running around trying
to achieve them.  FC6 had similar goals, as did FC5, both of which
slipped.  There are always more features to be had, and we have probably
slipped at least one six month period over the past couple releases.

If we really wanted to do time-base releases, the MustHaves page would
just say:

"Is it April 26th yet?"

and we'd work backwards from there.  Barring doing something that
radical (which GNOME does, to somewhat mixed results), I bet we always
slip a couple months, every release.

Thanks,
-Jonathan