FESCo: Feature process and release blocker process

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2011-07-16 at 12:48 -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:36:10 -0700
> Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> ...snip...
> 
> > We wanted to check that this was okay with FESCo and the feature
> > wrangler and the project in general before going ahead, so here we are
> > =) Please let us know if anyone is worried about this. Thanks!
> 
> Speaking only for myself (I suspect we should have FESCo discuss at
> their next meeting), this sounds completely reasonable to me. 
> 
> Each of the groups involved in a release should have a say (and does at
> the go/no go meeting). QA should focus on their testing and QA efforts
> to decide if they are go or no-go. Other groups may have their own
> criteria.

Thanks. For the record, we brought this up at today's FESCo meeting,
everyone agreed it sounded reasonable, and so I have added the following
paragraph to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Template:Release_criteria_definition :

"A Fedora feature being incomplete, in and of itself, does not
constitute a blocker bug. The feature process is separate from this
process. Features are required to meet certain standards at certain
points of the release cycle, but this is part of the feature process and
managed, tracked and enforced separately from this process. However, if
a proposed feature being incomplete causes any of the above criteria to
be met, then the bug is a release blocker."

(various of those words are hyperlinks to other bits of the wiki, to
make it easier to see what the 'feature process' is and so on). This
template is transcluded in the release criteria pages for each phase:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_16_Alpha_Release_Criteria
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_16_Beta_Release_Criteria
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_16_Final_Release_Criteria

I hope this is a clear and concise way to formalize the distinction
between the release validation and feature processes. Thanks!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw
http://www.happyassassin.net