refining the feature process

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 03:37:55PM +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
> I'm a bit confused. You spend the rest of the mail talking about when
> the feature freeze is for F15, but I'm not sure why. As long as F15 is
> open and it's not frozen (which it obviously isn't, yet) you can start
> doing development in it. As John P said, we've already started approving
> features for F15. So right now you can submit a feature for F15, have it
> approved, and start committing it. What is it that makes you say it's
> 'not the current feature process'?

The current process says you *can* start now, but the Feature Submission
Deadline isn't until two weeks before Feature Freeze, which is in turn right
before the Alpha.

One *can* start developing features at any time, but there's nothing in the
process that says one *should* do it earlier, and in fact, the late
deadlines imply a defacto standard last-minute approach. This isn't helped
by the description of the Feature Submission Deadline as not being really a
deadline at all: "FESCo will consider features proposed after this deadline
on an exception basis."


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