refining the feature process

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 09:14:24AM -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> For people wanting to make big changes to F15.. Do it *now*!  F15 is in
> its infancy.  It's taking shape.  If you want your feature to be a
> defining feature of F15.  Get it in *now*.

This seems like a completely sensible idea. However, it's not the current
feature process. The Feature Freeze is currently immediately before the
Branch Freeze, shortly before the Alpha Release.

Currently, we don't have F15 schedule at all, but following the previous
example, the Feature Freeze would be about two months from F14's release --
January 2011.

There is a major change since development of the features process which
makes it reasonable to revisit this -- in fact, a feature itself: No Frozen
Rawhide. This should enable more early, active feature development.

So, I'd like to suggest moving the Feature Freeze to be earlier: generally,
one month after the previous release, and maybe sooner for changes affecting
critical-path components. Then, the main decision for default/not-default
could be at the point of the alpha release, with a second re-check before
beta release. Features should not be reverted after beta.


-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional & Research Computing Services
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences