fedora 7 schedule (was Re: Fedora 7 planing)

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 07:43:03AM -0500, Luis Villa wrote:

 > >  > I would have suggested in the Xen case that you should have done (2),
 > >  > since I presume Xen is too tightly tied to the kernel to allow for (0)
 > >  > or (1). Why did you do (3) instead? Commitment to feature based
 > >  > releases over time-based releases? Some other reason?
 > >
 > > It was deemed "must have" functionality for a number of reasons.
 > > Two obvious ones being:
 > > 1. dropping it would be a regression vs FC5.
 > > 2. It's a major line item for RHEL5, and Fedora is supposedly
 > >    where stuff like this gets beaten into shape first.
 > 
 > (1) makes sense, though in that case there is an obvious question
 > about 'why was that last, broken patchset allowed in so late?'

It wasn't. It was perpetually busted for months.

 > As far as (2) goes, I thought Fedora was an independent project?

For the most part.  However sometimes there is crossover, especially
on big-ticket items like Xen.

 > > I find it hard to talk about Xen in person without cursing. Really.
 > 
 > That makes the question even more pressing, then. Assume Xen is
 > horribly broken come April 23rd. What will Fedora do? What process
 > will the board go through to make that decision? The earlier you know
 > what that process is, the better you can plan.

My vote is to drop it like a stone, and move on.
Others may have differing opinions, but I'm tired of being screwed by
an upstream that frankly, doesn't care about open source.
Upstream kernel.org seems to be heading on a different path to virtualisation
anyway (KVM for full-virt and lhype for paravirt).  KVM is merged already,
lhype needs a *lot* more work to get feature parity with xen, but is feasible
by the time we get to thinking about RHEL6.

 > > tbh, I agree with you. Fedora should not be hostage to RHEL feature requirements.
 > > Merging Xen was the single biggest headache I've faced in kernel maintainence
 > > in the last 3.5 years.  Even NPTL against the RHL 2.4 kernels was a walk
 > > in the park compared to this fiasco.
 > 
 > So whose responsibility is it to make that call? (Or alternately, to
 > public admit that that call can't be made?) Again, the earlier the
 > policy is decided on, the better for everyone.

Somewhere in rh engineering mgmt.  Xen was a 'must have' for RHEL5.
(Probably at least in part because Novl shipped same, and we needed
 feature parity).  Just dropping this into RHEL5 without putting it
into Fedora would've sacrificed a *lot* of testing.
I'm not justifying that it's the right thing to do, but there are
forces at play here pulling Fedora in two different directions.

 > >  > Since it is specifically external legal liability that prevents (2),
 > >  > that suggests being as proactive as possible about all *legal* issues
 > >  > in order to avoid delays. Understanding that perfect foresight is
 > >  > impossible, who is in charge of assessing legal issues and being the
 > >  > best humanly possible lookout for legal icebergs? What are they doing
 > >  > right now to help meet this proposed schedule?
 > >
 > > Red Hat legal is pretty much the gatekeeper for such issues.
 > 
 > Gatekeepers are by definition stationary and deal with problems that
 > come to them :) Who from Fedora is responsible for pushing RH legal to
 > work proactively on this kind of thing, or alternately, responsible
 > for finding such problems and bringing them to RH legal ASAP?

Max & Greg I guess ?

 > > Towards the end of FC6 dev cycle, we did a few things differently
 > > to improve things.
 > > * bi-weekly status meetings. Just a half hour concall to make
 > >   sure everyone knew the state of the onion.
 > 
 > Does Will have the power in these meetings to change priorities and
 > direct engineering resources towards the end of a cycle? e.g., during
 > the FC7 meetings, what will happen if he screams about Xen? :)

iirc, Will joined rh just after half-way through the FC6 cycle,
so FC7 will be his first real 'trial by fire'.  He did cope admirably
being thrown in at the deep end at during FC6 though, so I'm sure
he'll pull the fire alarm if needed.

 > Luis (everyone wish me luck on my Torts exam tomorrow.)

Now that's an exam I could get behind.
http://www.strongbowinn.com/tortes.htm
Good luck :)

		Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk