Fedora 13 Alpha Go/No-Go Meeting: 2010-03-04 @ 01:00 UTC Recap

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 15:53 -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> > I'm not particularly sold on the definition in the freeze policy, and
> > honestly I suspect it's been honored much more in the breach than in the
> > observance. I'd be very surprised if all planned features of a given
> > release have ever been fully 'testable' in our Alpha releases. Frankly,
> > that seems like an unrealistic goal given the timescales we work with,
> > depending what definition of 'testable' you want to take (there's a huge
> > amount of wiggle room in that word).
> > 
> We should change or refine the Freeze Policy page then.  Having different
> definitions of what is required for alpha to go out and what can go in after
> alpha leads to incorrect expectations on the part of developers.

I agree. I think probably all we need to do is remove the weasel-word
'testable' and give a more solid definition there.

> > To give a practical example, if 'KDE X.Y with shiny new IM client' is
> > listed as a feature for the Alpha, we'd say the freeze policy requires
> > the new IM client should actually be present in the Alpha package set.
> > But we wouldn't say the release should be blocked if there's a bug which
> > causes it to fail to launch, even though this arguably makes it 'not
> > testable'. The theory is that there's no point holding the Alpha release
> > to fix something we can fix equally well in post-Alpha updates, since
> > there's no net benefit to anyone. But we should probably discuss this in
> > more detail.
> >
> Big +1 to that.  I don't care too much what the criteria is as long as its
> consistent and doesn't put package maintainers in an impossible position wrt
> getting their development done and into the next release.

OK, cool. How do you want to move this forward?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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