To freeze, or not to freeze

Seth Vidal skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Mon Sep 8 15:49:44 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 10:27 -0500, Jon Ciesla wrote:
> > A few weeks back the releng team made a schedule adjustment, to make up
> > for lost rawhide time due to the intrusion.  When we made that schedule
> > adjustment, we had assumed having a working rawhide within days of that
> > meeting, giving us a week or so worth of working rawhide to shake out
> > any pre-beta bugs we wanted to.
> >
> > Unfortunately, while we were able to /attempt/ rawhide creation as
> > scheduled, a series of software bugs and bad personnel timing has
> > prevented those attempts from producing usable rawhide images until
> > basically today (and today's are pretty shaky from what I hear).  This
> > is not so good, as without an installable rawhide, we don't get a good
> > idea as to how the installer is working, and we miss out on a lot of
> > 'initial install' testing of software on people's systems.  We get a lot
> > of "I upgraded from foo" type testing, which definitely has it's value,
> > but I feel we're missing a pretty key part of the rawhide experience.
> >
> > The Beta freeze is set for Tomorrow.  That means the content that would
> > show up in tomorrow's rawhide would also be the content we use as the
> > basis of Beta.  Any changes after that would have to be ran through the
> > releng/qa teams to be approved.
> >
> > Given the "fun" we had with Alpha, I really feel that it would be
> > prudent to spend a few more unfrozen days with a hopefully continually
> > working rawhide installer so that we can do some of that last minute
> > testing of what's wrong before we freeze, and hopefully have a shorter
> > and more productive freeze period.  But this is just my opinion, and
> > thus I'm putting this out there for discussion.
> >
> > Feature owners in particular, I'm interested in your opinions as to if
> > you need a few more days to see what shape your features are in before
> > we freeze.  Ideally the week before a freeze would have been a slow down
> > period, where large changes were avoided and bugfixing was focused on so
> > that the Beta was useful.  I feel like we didn't give you a chance to do
> > this and it'll still feel like crash landing planes on the carrier deck
> > when it come to features in Beta.
> >
> > I'm interested in what the rest of you think as well, both package
> > owners and testers alike.  If you think our schedule time would be
> > better spent fixing and verifying things pre-freeze and adding an extra
> > week to the schedule, or just freeze as things are, and potentially slip
> > a week during the freeze to make everything usable for the Beta (or the
> > third option, things are fine as they are, just freeze and release as
> > scheduled and stop being so paranoid).
> >
> > What say you?
> 
> Wait a bit, maybe slip the release a week if you have to.  Better slippage
> than suckage, IMHO.  After the intrusion, I think users will understand.

slipping the release a week gets complicated as we get dangerously close
to thanksgiving in the US which takes a huge number of contributors out
of the world.

-sv





More information about the devel mailing list