F17 process change proposal

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 21:55, Tom Lane <tgl at redhat.com> wrote:
> Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> writes:
>> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 01:08:56 +0300,
>>   Kalev Lember <kalevlember at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> With my proposal, Branched and rawhide would have exactly the same
>>> package set during the Alpha Freeze - Beta Freeze time frame. That way,
>>> we'd have a month to let users choose whether they want to stay on the
>>> Branched or on the rawhide track.
>
>> I'd still like to be able to play with new stuff that might not be ready
>> by beta, in rawhide during that time.
>
> Yeah.  This proposal seems like it breaks one of the fundamental process
> improvements we already made, namely No Frozen Rawhide.  I don't have a
> problem with Kalev's goal of reducing the amount of overhead for
> maintainers who only want to update rawhide and branched together, but
> I do object to doing that by preventing maintainers who want to push
> rawhide forward from doing so.

It is only an improvement if it works consistently.  The problem is
that all it takes is some critical package getting a 'broken' update
in rawhide and the developer getting pulled into concentrating on
release issues that a de-facto freeze occurs anyway. The perception
from living on rawhide for a while is that this happens enough during
the alpha/beta/rc stage that we might as well freeze because critpath
items that upgraded but don't work aren't going to get focus until
after Fedora N is out the door.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
battle." -- Ian MacLaren