refining the feature process

[John Poelstra]

Matthew Miller said the following on 09/15/2010 07:57 AM Pacific Time:
> 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.
>

I don't recall any situation where someone submitted a feature at the 
deadline without having done anything and then scrambling for two weeks 
to finish by feature freeze.

> 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."
>

Exceptions have been few and far between, and only granted, to my 
knowledge, for features that were 100% complete.

Those deadlines are set in such a way as to put as much development time 
as possible into a release schedule. From a release engineering 
perspective (the team proposing the schedules for approval by FESCo) it 
was determined that this was the highest value.

John