Responsibility for rebuilding dependent components, was: F-16 Branched report: 20110920 changes

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2011-09-20 at 10:03 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:

> I'd like to see a rationale for jamming a soname-changing update into 
> the OS so close to a release.  In the absence of a very good motivation, 
> that's not good engineering practice, and it's not consistent with the 
> feature process.
> 
> Perhaps you're not clear on what the word "freeze" means.

It may be worth pointing out that our release cycle has undergone
significant changes with the early branching that we've introduced in
F15.

We align our releases closes to things like the GNOME release. That used
to be fine in the old days, but now we have added early branching and
made it considerably harder to push large sets of updates post-alpha,
which makes it quite onerous to get e.g. GNOME updates into a branched
Fedora release.

We've set our freezes as if we expect all major development to be done
at that point, but we've aligned our schedules in a way that guarantees
that (at least for GNOME) major development is still happening at the
time of branching.