The slip down memory lane

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-08-16 at 14:18 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:

> I think this is worth further discussion.  If the number is towards the
> 48-63 days level and that's what window people are actually doing
> development that may be a problem because it is an extremely short time
> period.
> 
> It's also interesting that with all the freezes, deadlines, etc we have
> firm explicit set dates.  While active development is implicit.  it might
> be worth it to set active deployment as an explicit time period just as
> another reminder to everyone about when major changes are going on vs when
> they aren't.

As I mentioned briefly on IRC, I think the problem is that we're kinda
stuck between two models: we're trying to move to a model where
development starts when N-1 branches and finishes when N Alpha hits
freeze, and from then on, there's only bugfixes to N. But I think to an
extent we've partially achieved the stricter freezes which restrict
development to 'until Alpha freeze', but we haven't really successfully
moved all our processes and conventions so that people start development
for N+1 while N is still going on. Just look at the queue of updates to
go into F14 after the Alpha releases, for instance; lots of that stuff
is stuff that shouldn't strictly happen under the ideal of the current
model.

So practically speaking, most teams are starting major development from
'N-1 release' - probably minus a week for the post-release lull when
everyone takes a breather. It's very unlikely that everything can
actually get done between then and Alpha freeze, so stuff is running
over. We even schedule it, in some cases - GNOME 2.32 clearly isn't
close to done and is still going through API changes (though that's
partly complicated by going to GTK+ 3 and back again). systemd is still
very early. The Python 2.7 migration isn't really complete yet. These
are just examples, and I'm not suggesting anyone involved with those
projects is doing anything 'wrong', just observing how things are
actually currently happening.

For instance, right now, according to the Ideal Plan, everyone should
have started on their Big Plans for F15 in Rawhide and should be
committing the really big changes from now forward. Is anyone actually
at that point? If not, then we're just going to go through the same
cycle for F15-F16 because people will start their work for F15 after F14
is done, realize there isn't enough time to get it done before Alpha
freeze, keep working on it through Alpha freeze and Beta even, and not
have time to start their big changes for F16 before F15 is nearly
done...and so on ad infinitum. It may be a bit of a tough cycle to
break.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net