My Board member task: Fix the Feature Process

[Dennis Gilmore]

El Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:50:32 -0800
Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> escribió:
> Since we didn't get to the Board member tasks at yesterday's meeting,
> jsmith suggested that the Board members send the goals they've
> selected (if they've done so already) to the mailing list to start
> discussion.
> 
> I've talked to rbergeron and decided to take the task of fixing the
> Feature Process.  We've known for a long time that the Feature
> Process provides a useful service but at the expense of aggravating
> the people implementing features [sometimes unnecessarily], annoying
> the people deciding what's a feature [often unnecessarily], and
> without always achieving the collaboration needed to make release
> happen without slippage and/or last minute fixing of feature-driven
> brokenness [seems like at least every other release].
> 
> These and other problems were collected by rbergeron and other
> impacted Fedora contributors on:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fixing_features
> 
> I'll be working on taking those identified problems and turning out a
> new Feature Policy that FESCo can approve which addresses those
> issues.
> 
> -Toshio

I think that we need to have a cutoff date that is around 6 weeks
before feature freeze where any feature that is very disruptive has to
land before. that includes things requiring mass rebuilds or that
significantly change something. we can then schedule a mass rebuild 5
weeks before feature freeze and allow plenty of time to clean up from
breakages/failures. we should probably look at removing no longer
maintained packages at this point also.

Dennis